Flat teeth are not "herbivore teeth"

For the purposes of long winded douchebaggery it might be more convenient to look at things singularly, but even to grant your ideas about the teeth of humans some far fetched credibility, the next question is what the hell are they doing on a mandible jaw within a mouth that generates saliva unsuitable for the digestion of meat, that connects up to a digestive tract too weak and too long for meat and incapable of dealing with the raw rancid preferences of every other carnivore on the planet on a body jammed to the hilt with sweat pores?

:bugeye:

 

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This is the second thread in which he's done that: write long paragraphs about a whole lot of unrelated but detailed (and often, dead wrong) nonsense, while careening by the pointed-out snags in his methods. One of them being his tendency to present highly coincidental and seemingly trivial scenarios as regularly occuring events that were crucial enough to human survival to the point that it altered our evolution. The best example would be Paranthropus Boisei getting drunk from alcohol containing fruits that had rotted for a certain amount of time, which then fooled the boisei into believing that the head of a nearby dead monkey was a hardened fruit. When you question whether such things truly happened, he says "you're just not using your imagination" or some such.

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An earlier conversation of his hinged on the idea that a male bonding hormone (vasopressin) contributed to males dominating the field of engineering due to the social satisfaction it granted. When I pointed out to him that vasopressin contributed to bonding between sexual partners and *aggression* between males, he blew his stack.

 

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Nope, wrong. Vegans are just people who choose not to eat animal products for one reason or other.

 

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Okay. I apologize for becoming overzealous. I will try to use more civil language, and I will try to be more agreeable.

It sure does. When you order a side salad with your plate of steaming, dead cow, you are doing exactly that. Fibrous vegetable matter effectively scrubs your teeth. Also, there are many fruits that contain anti-bacterial acids, and this could have something to do with the fact that people often seek out a dessert after a large dinner. In Ancient Roman times, the overt purpose of dessert was to cleanse the palate. In some cultures, I think it is almost considered to be vulgar to skip out on it.

It could be done. The mechanics are still perfectly sound. Our ancestors had larger, more powerful jaws and heavier bones. They would have needed the extra minerals, anyway.

This hinges on the highly dubious assumption that wisdom teeth come with a second instance of teething behavior.[/quote]Actually, I think it would be more like the third. First our baby teeth come in, then our adult teeth, and later we get a big set of molars in the back.

I kept mine, which are presently causing some slight, nearly imperceptible crowding. I actually did chew on things in order to relieve the itching.

Not in the feasibility of my original position that the human jaw could have been used to get into bones. I am not advocating the idea as strongly as I was, but it remains fairly feasible. However, I have changed my stance on a few tangential issues several times, yes.

I believe that I have changed my arguments far more often due to my own bursts of insight.

I would like to know where you supported any such position. The ability to swim is a relatively recent adaptation. Our cousins in the wild are almost incapable of this feat, but humans are are fairly adept at it for a species that exists primarily as a land mammal. This would probably support the position that humans underwent a declination in the density of their bones.

The bones of animals are still the most efficient means of attaning these nutrients. Large-boned grazers, by the way, do not serve as disproof of this claim at all: grazing animals have to eat almost continuously throughout the day, and this is likely to result in them picking up a number of trace minerals, including minerals that can be obtained directly from the soil. For the purposes of a human being, it is actually quite a lot easier to bag a naive marmoset using a thrown rock.

I don't know that they don't. I see no particular reason that they should discard parts of the animal that they are perfectly capable of eating if they don't have to. Do you have any evidence that chimpanzees tend to discard the bones of their kills? Do you have any rationalization as to why they would eat other parts of the animal, including its brains, but specially refrain from gnawing its bones?

There are a number of minerals in animal bones, not just calcium. Zinc, for example, is a trace mineral in bones that is valuable in men's health: it improves testosterone production. I am not sure why you don't think that animal bones would be a good source of calcium. The skeletons of proto-humans may well have had a higher bone density, in which case we would have needed it.

That is an extremely good question. So our primitive ancestors actually did carefully butcher their kills, apparently discarding the bones? Well, that would actually correlate a lot better with the behavior of modern humans. Although it may have been mechanically possible for humans to have used their mandibles for the purpose of cracking small bones, I would have to suspend judgement on whether it is actually likely that they did this unless evidence were found that they actually did have bone or cartilage in their diet. Interesting.

Humans today are known for chewing "thoughtfully" on grass stems, and I have personally observed third-graders rooting in the grass for the stems of certain weeds that produce a sweet taste when they squeeze the shafts between their teeth. The expended stems are usually thrown away. This is also an interesting thing to note. I think that we can make a lot of good guesses regarding the behavior of our primitive ancestors by observing our natural propensities in modern times.

 

Stick it up your ass, cunthead.

Humans are perfectly capable of chewing and swallowing meat, and millions of Americans prove this fact on a daily basis by (you guessed it) consuming at least a modest quantity of meat or other animal protein with almost every meal that they have. In spite of your insinuation that human saliva is not capable of adequately digesting meat, humans who do eat modest to moderate quantities of thoroughly cooked meat, particularly fish, as a part of their regular diet can have life expectencies in excess of a century. Humans are also an omnivorous species that naturally relies far more heavily upon grains than anything else, and I actually have offerred more than just speculation regarding the role of fibrous vegetables in maintaining the cleanliness of the upper respiratory tract.

You mean that you have never heard of steak tartare? You have never had a medium-rare hamburger, which many humans throughout the world prefer over thoroughly cooked meat?

By the way, have you heard about that funny culture that has the longest life expectancy in the world? Yeah, they eat raw fish. That's raw FISH, like the kind that you need to eat with a fork and knife, not just the prissy, little rolls that we eat here in the States. That's what the guys who have the really really long life expectancies are eating: RAW FUCKING FISH. They just have a greater appreciation for the other components of a healthy diet.

I am not sure what the point of this statement actually is.

 

What I actually stated was that vasopressin plays a role in temporal memory. At around this point, I had a bit of an epiphany, and I realized that the kinds of thought processes used in planning and executing a hunt for a game animal may be the kinds of thought processes employed by a mechanical engineer are almost identical. Due to a number of factors, males would have better temporal-spatial reckoning. It was an interesting thread, and this was only one of a few interesting ideas I stumbled upon.

I pointed out that vasopressin plays a role in social functioning in general, not just between sexual partners. I also pointed out that the behavior of vasopressin in the human brain is kind of complicated.

By the way, WillNever, you have established yourself, in this thread, as one of the least honest human beings that I have ever encountered. By the way, I am 6'2", and I weigh 170 pounds. I am probably in ten times better physical condition than you are. You call yourself an "outdoorsman," but I doubt you know much about living in the outdoors for the long-term. It's pretty easy if you know what you're doing. Tip: if you find a black snake, bring it home, and call it a pet. They kill copperheads, so they're good friends to have in the area; however, they will bite you pretty hard if they detect that you suffer from bad manners. You should find garter snakes to keep in your tent or near your food supplies because they kill vermin, and this includes annoying frogs if your area happens to be infested with them. In an emergency, they also make great bait for crayfish. I pretty much live in the outdoors, shithead. By the way, my diet is mostly gruels and porridges, very Scottish in style. They are actually quite good for you. They are filling. They are cheap.

 

The basis of your thread was that men were somehow better at keeping track of different things that had multiple purposes all at once... which, due to their brain structure, women are known for being better at. If you're going to keep making that argument, try to aim for a little consistency.

Actually that isn't what you pointed out, but what fun is the truth?

It doesn't sound like it. You sound fat. You are, aren't you?

More unrelated details about a whole lotta nonsense, in order to appear informed.

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Son of a bitch... I had a long reply in the works, and then my computer crashed.

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Rather than try to reproduce all of that, I'll summarize. Basically, I scoured the Web and a few academic journals and here's what I found.

• Chimpanzees have been seen to consume the bones of their kills, so my mistake there. I found no mentions of the vise behavior specifically, but the above behavior is probably more significant anyway.
• Fossil evidence (based on craniodental morphology, dental wear patterns, and enamel isotope analysis) tells us two main things about early hominid diet with regards to the topic of this thread: 1) With the appearance of the Homo genus around 2.5 MYA, meat eating was a near certainty, but consumption of bones probably did not occur. 2) In earlier hominids -- Australopithecus in particular -- meat consumption was a less important aspect of the diet (compared to fruits, leaves, and to a lesser extent nuts, seeds, and possibly grasses), but probably did occur on a more occasional basis, particularly in later species. However, for the meat that was eaten by these species, the probability of the bones being consumed along with the meat is somewhat greater. (That last part is not strictly based on fossil evidence, but rather taking into account observations from modern primates.)
• The conclusion (mine, to be clear) is that while the vise behavior itself remains questionable, the probably more interesting behavior of consuming the animal bones along with the meat reaches peak plausibility during the general time period of the Australopithecus genus (approx. 5 MYA - 2.5 MYA), when overall size was generally increasing, craniodental morphology was still relatively robust, and tools had still not come into use. Prior to this period, the evidence suggests a diet lacking in meat (and therefore bones), and after this period the evidence suggests meat consumption but no bones. In short, if it happened at all during the proto-human lineage, it was probably during this period.

 

Alright. In that case, it would be interesting to know when and why our ancestors stopped doing so. Perhaps the larger quantity of meat in their diet resulted in making it relatively redundant for them to try to chew animal bones? If they were getting meat in quantity, then they would have gotten more than sufficient mineral supplementation from odd bits of cartilage and such. It would have been a waste of their energy at that point to waste perfectly good teeth on hard bone.

I am unsure why you think so. However, I have taken into consideration a few other possible uses for the human jaw. It is really a fascinating, versatile tool. Consider the use it is put into during modern times: it is almost a third hand. We use it for opening packages, holding pencils, trimming down our nails, and so on and so forth. It's like having a Leatherman. Perhaps it would be myopic to speak of it as if it had a specialized use. The uses of any given adaptation are only cut short by the needs and imagination of its wielder.

Personally, my diet consists largely of oatmeal and the like, interspersed occasionally with a can of anchovies or something weird like that. People stare at me regarding some of my dietary choices. They understand the oatmeal because it is cheaper than ramen noodles after you have totalled everything together. It's also not as hard on your teeth; ramen sticks to your teeth like glue and makes a lot of plaque that needs to be brushed off immediately. What they do not understand is the fact that, when I had money, I would regularly skip down to the Japanese place and eat nothing but fish eggs or MAYBE eel, not even eyeing anything else on the menu. You see, I was a starving college student prior to the greatest economic recession since the Great Depression. At least then I had air conditioning, and I was not as thoroughly surrounded by hostile flora and fauna. However, I still won't eat a piece of chocolate unless I paid at least four dollars for the bar. Chocolate is a delicacy. The most terrible crime we ever committed against it was making it affordable. 83% cacao tastes just fine if you paid a week's wages for it. I do weirder things.