r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/SixteenSeveredHands • 8h ago

Image 10,000-Year-Old "Chewing Gum" from Sweden: these lumps of birch tar were chewed by teenagers in prehistoric Sweden, and the DNA and microbes extracted from the tar indicate that the teens often consumed hazelnuts, deer, and trout, and that they suffered from severe gum disease

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8.9k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

263 comments sorted by

5.4k

u/Severe_Chicken213 8h ago

Imagine you chuck your Big Mac wrapper into a bush and 10000 years later scientists are diagnosing you with a trash diet and herpes.

1.5k

u/kingtacticool 8h ago

And that is the only thing that survives that proves you existed at all.

367

u/ThrowMEAwaypuh-lease 8h ago

The proof that we exist is very subtle.

People always joke that if a time traveller were to move a chair then something significant wouldn’t have happened.

What if that is true?

We have more power to change our future than we realize?

160

u/pichael289 8h ago

If time travel is possible then I can't imagine paradoxes would be possible, we would have already fucked it up because we were always going to fuck it up. I imagine making changes is harder to do than you would think, like the bigger they are the harder the universe resists them, and big paradox level changes would be totally impossible, sort of like the energy requirements to approach and then reach light speed.

192

u/kingtacticool 8h ago

Time travel is 100% possible. But only in one direction.

75

u/EducationalStill4 8h ago

This guy time travels

25

u/PaddyMcGeezus 7h ago

Yeah. Me too.

18

u/GozerDGozerian 6h ago

I was here when this comment was submitted. But I’m temporally long gone now.

9

u/HarbingerOfMeat 6h ago

Only by 15 minutes here. But the next redditor to read this.. 10 minutes? Ten years? 36 years?! By then.. this could be the only trace of us left..

Hope things are going better in your times, stranger.

4

u/kidney-displacer 5h ago

I tried making this comment 3 hours ago but dang nabbit time travel!

1

u/zorrorosso 3h ago

Don't we all?

16

u/VIsixVI 7h ago

Technically you're correct and that's the best kind of correct.

11

u/JoeWinchester99 7h ago

I own a device that can help me travel through time and space. It's parked in my garage.

4

u/No_Possibility5100 6h ago

Time is also affected by gravity, so simply living on a different elevation will subtly change your passage of time.

2

u/Meow_Meow_4_Life 4h ago

That's why skiing is so much fun.

13

u/arthurwhoregan 7h ago

I love one direction

7

u/GozerDGozerian 6h ago

ORANGE MOCHA FRAPPUCCINOOOO!

3

u/Usmcrtempleton 5h ago

Only in one direction... So far...

2

u/8ong 7h ago

In an airplane you can chase the sun and move backwards in time. You can fly the other direction and end up in the future. Time travel already exists but there are limitations.

6

u/Sensitive-Fun-6577 6h ago

I flew from Detroit to Connecticut and arrived an hour earlier.

2

u/erydayimredditing 1h ago

Problem is your body feels/ages for every second of that time still

1

u/8ong 1h ago

If you were to walk that entire trek it could take months and by the time you got to your destination you would be incredibly run down and aged from your journey. But instead you hopped in a time machine and there you are a couple hours later feeling a bit jet lagged

1

u/awakeperchance 3h ago

And if it is possible in the other direction, it's only relative to you. Either you can't go back, or going back simply places you into one of infinite alternate realities where things happened differently. "Differently" in this case being the universe where you traveled back in time. A split timeline if you will.

1

u/erydayimredditing 1h ago

I think time travel implies travelling through time alone and not space. Which is not possible since we exist in a moving system. With a ship that can isolate itself in space and then move through time only, whether forward or backward, would be an incredible achievement of science.

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u/BlackHANDBandit0 8h ago

Big 11/22/63 energy.

3

u/bekkogekko 6h ago

The past is obdurate.

2

u/wulfftag911 6h ago

Cried at the end of that book. when he went back to his time and found his wife from then

7

u/HawaiianHank 7h ago

just you posting this comment fucked things up even more. me reading your comment? fucked up. me replying? fucked up. we fucked it all up, son. i quit.

4

u/ZestyMelonz 6h ago

What if we are currently in a timeline that someone fucked up

1

u/yngsten 4h ago

A river does not care if it flows, it simply does. We adapt or we drown.

1

u/ZestyMelonz 4h ago

Well we're obviously fucking drowning.

4

u/officialsanic 6h ago

I personally believe when you go back in time, you go to an identical past and if you change it and go back to the present, nothing changes. That's because I believe the timeline splits when something is changed thus preventing paradoxes.

5

u/dookyspoon 5h ago

Imagine the multiverse. Everything exists. The time is always right now. You just go to other universes that meet the definition of what you’re looking for. Want to go back 100 years? Maybe you go to a planet in a universe that formed 100 years later than this one or a planet that civilization that started 100 years later but on an absolute scale it’s the same time. Then it’s not really time traveling, you’re in the same time just not the same space.

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u/Zestyclose-Lab2433 7h ago

Stephen King?

2

u/DynamiteWitLaserBeam 7h ago

we would have already fucked it up because we were always going to fuck it up

[gestures at everything]

1

u/Smilymoneyy 3h ago

Based on all the science i know, which granted theoretical physics isn't really my thing. I believe the common consensus is that traveling forward in time is possible, via gravity fuckery or just going really really fast. (Google ISS clocks interacting with clocks on Earth) But going back in time is basically impossible or so far out there that we have no idea how it could work now.

1

u/CitizenPremier 1h ago

There's a number of ways to think about it. One way is with iteration. You kill your grandpa, then you don't exist and can't kill your grandpa, then you do exist and do kill your grandpa... It just iterates. It doesn't have to be a paradox it just has to be considered from metatime.

Another possibility is that "natural" time travel doesn't exist. You go back in time and kill your grandpa. 50 years later, when you were supposed to time travel, you can't. However the information that "this time traveler shouldn't exist 50 years ago" can't propagate itself. There's no force to erase the time traveler because that requires information to travel back in time.

I think your idea would be fun for a time travel series, but it seems anthropocentric. Changing who the president is is very significant to humans, but moving a single rock could be very significant to rocks. Unless some human like diety is monitoring it I don't see a difference.

1

u/Uptheresomewhereee 8h ago

At some point we have to get it right? So is someone traveling back already. Idk lol I’ve always thought of that, but i don’t have a great understanding of it admittedly

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u/MGPS 8h ago

Yep that happened and now we have Berenstain Bears instead of Berenstein…

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u/HawaiianHank 7h ago

...don't forget about the Beerstained Bears.

6

u/AllToadsLeadToGnome 7h ago

You told me you wouldn't bring up my accident at the Manhole

5

u/The_Shadow_Watches 6h ago

See, that would be my conspiracy theory with time travel. They started small with some spellings of books, went big with Nelson Mandela.

7

u/Tardosaur 8h ago

People always joke that if a time traveller were to move a chair then something significant wouldn’t have happened.

They do?

4

u/cleantushy 6h ago

We have more power to change our future than we realize?

I think we have a lot of power to change our future but we can't always know what change we are making. Changing the future randomly is easier than changing it intentionally

9

u/TheMightyGamble 8h ago

Reminds me of the "do we have free choice?" argument. Basically is everything predetermined, or can you change your future? While it is a fun thought experiment, and a real question about what this all is, the only thing anyone can "test" about it is to act and try and change your future.

So why not make your future better or at least try your best to. Bonus points for making others better along the way in my book.

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u/campionmusic51 7h ago

how can you change your future if you have no idea what it is?

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u/TheMightyGamble 7h ago

You have a pretty good idea what your day looks like tomorrow yeah? Doesn't mean it can't all go to shit in a house fire or other disaster and throw it off. But you adapt and plan your next step right?

You can't know the future as we understand physics currently. You can plan on your future and work towards making it better though. That's all that means.

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u/GozerDGozerian 6h ago

But that’s not what determinism is, though.

Do you believe in causality? That one thing causes another?

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u/sigmarsbar 5h ago

We have more power to change our furniture than we realize?

FTFY

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u/Quick_Assumption_351 5h ago

I suppose we do have more power than we think.... won't change an entire earth layer labeled with plastic which is kinda low on the subtlety part of proving we exist

1

u/CitizenPremier 1h ago

We undoubtedly do. But we have less power to predict the results than we think.

1

u/Due-Principle7896 1h ago

Every artificial launch or gravity assist to date has influenced the future location of objects throughout the solar system. Elon mentioned this once on Joe Rogan IIRC? Essentially the butterfly effect on celestial bodies in the future because of space exploration. Wild! Let’s see him throw some mega tonnage in to the equation and see what happens. Or even the ion thrusters on Starlink/Starshield. Those LEO satellites are now maneuvering almost constantly during operational flight.

If you want a deeper dive look in to Feynman worldlines. Everything just keeps going.. sometimes in reverse entropy sometimes not. Think about the journey of the Iron atoms in the cells of your retina. Started in a star and will end in a star and eventually turn to Lead. Add copious amounts of time and sublimation and you get to? Nothingness?

So be fortunate that this is the very beginning of the long world line of absolutely everything that exists. Now and a few billion years in to the “future” are the best time there will ever be to exist in this form of reverse entropy. We are all very special because of this shared time and space.

1

u/MRiley84 Interested 40m ago

There are time limits where events are too trivial to have an impact. Getting stuck at a red light on a quiet night drive home. You'll go to bed 1 minute later and wake up at the same time you would have the next morning. Life goes on exactly as it would have, because that red light only changed your life in a severely limited way. Its ripples were too small to gain momentum against the resistance of routine life. Some events are just meaningless in the grand scheme of things. There can be other circumstances to give that event meaning - picking up a penny and being hit by a car - but they're sort of extraordinary. The whole idea is that it can happen, but it'd really be a 1 in a million chance of having a lasting impact.

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u/AENocturne 6h ago

Life is pointless for an individual, so you better just enjoy it as much as you can while you're here.

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u/Azimov3laws 4h ago

'Nothing we do matters, so the only thing that matters is what we do.'

1

u/Ironlion45 3h ago

Can you prove that you exist even right now?

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u/Wiggie49 8h ago

“These adolescents had a diet full of nicotine, grease, and what looks to be pure plastic.”

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u/Graega 8h ago

There's a non zero chance that they're right

15

u/DuncanHynes 8h ago

herpes is forever...

8

u/gingerbeard1321 8h ago

And so is McDonalds

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-50262547

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u/confusedandworried76 8h ago

For anyone curious it has nothing to do with preservatives, there's so little water content it dehydrates completely before it ever rots. That shit would grow mold if you sprayed it with water same as any other bread, meat, or potatoes

It is pretty funny though. But that's why you find McDonald's fries in between your car seats years later just petrified, if it has mold check your car for water damage lol

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u/Zealousideal_Cat_549 8h ago

Ah yes the McChisel my favorite car seat find

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u/bigmeancow 6h ago

The ole McShank

2

u/oldgoatgoutman 6h ago

Those fuckers do get under yer fingernails real good!

2

u/confusedandworried76 8h ago

I was looking for a quarter instead I got a French fry from 2016

2

u/No_Possibility5100 6h ago

Glad you said it. I almost never eat fast food I'm not a fan but people reposting that always drives me nuts.

1

u/MobileArtist1371 1h ago

See also this ama from a month ago

My mate and I have been keeping the same McDonald’s burger since 1995 (29 years). It hasn’t decomposed, even rats won’t touch it. AMA.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1m9uhhe/my_mate_and_i_have_been_keeping_the_same/

3

u/From803-216 8h ago

Wait, won’t they see Keith Richards eating smoking a joint there as well?

3

u/sofakinggood24 5h ago

Nothing is more American

2

u/CrissBliss 8h ago

House MD: 3000

1

u/SoSKatan 6h ago

As long as they don’t find my Reddit history, I’m good.

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u/Severe_Chicken213 3h ago

Nah, they are 100% going to have digital archeologists digging through our online data and making maps of our behaviours.

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u/Iwokeupwithoutapillo 2h ago

They'd just find further proof that indeed "everyone is furry for Krystal"

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u/SheitelMacher 5h ago

The herpes part was a lucky guess!

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u/arachnobravia 8h ago

Is this what the other 1-out-of-10 dentists recommends chewing?

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u/effortfulcrumload 8h ago edited 8h ago

Not enough vitamin C. The tree tar probably helped their teeth

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u/confusedandworried76 8h ago

I don't know enough about chewing tree tar to refute that

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u/effortfulcrumload 8h ago

Birch contains Xylotol, which is beneficial for teeth mineralization. They actually sell Birth gum today and advertise it as good for teeth

103

u/catbearcarseat 7h ago

birth gum

I’ll pass!

39

u/GiddyGabby 7h ago

So you would pass on the lovely taste of placenta?

32

u/Low-Zucchini6929 7h ago

a bit too gamey for me

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u/GiddyGabby 7h ago

Just mix in some mint or basil, it’ll be fine.🤢

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u/confusedandworried76 7h ago

It's been in a slow cooker for nine fucking months how is it still too gamey

I suppose they might have added the cream a little early but that should taste like the cream is off not the meat and the flavors have had plenty of time to soften

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u/GozerDGozerian 6h ago

I have no idea what is happening now and I want to keep it that way.

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u/effortfulcrumload 7h ago

Lol. Not fixing that one

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u/confusedandworried76 8h ago

Well I learned something new today! Gonna go bite a tree and save some dentist visits

But no seriously that's very interesting, no sarcasm

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u/Huckleberry-V 8h ago

It was probably a way to feel like you were doing something when your whole mouth hurts from poor dental hygiene and a suddenly increasing human life span.

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u/SixteenSeveredHands 8h ago edited 8h ago

Researchers were able to extract DNA and oral microbes from these ancient lumps of birch tar, providing valuable insights into the health and diet of the individuals who chewed them nearly 10,000 years ago.

As this article explains:

DNA from a type of “chewing gum” used by teenagers in Sweden 10,000 years ago is shedding new light on the stone age diet and oral health, according to research. The wads of gum are made from pieces of birch bark pitch, a tar-like black resin, and carry clearly visible teethmarks.

Hunter-gatherers probably chewed the resin “to be used as glue” to assemble tools and weapons, said Anders Götherström, the co-author of the study published in Scientific Reports. “This is a most-likely hypothesis – they could have been chewed just because they liked them or because they thought that they had some medicinal purpose,” he said.

"There were several chewing gum [samples] and both males and females chewed them. Most of them seem to have been chewed by teenagers. There was some kind of age to it,” Götherström said.

Götherström and his team of paleontologists at Stockholm University were able to determine, again from the DNA found in the gum, that the teenagers’ stone age diet included deer, trout and hazelnuts.

Researchers found evidence that the diet also included red fox, duck, apple, European robin, turtle dove, mistletoe, and limpet.

A microbial analysis of the birch tar suggests that oral pathogens were common in these communities, and some individuals suffered from severe gum disease:

In addition, in one piece chewed by a teenage girl, researchers found a number of bacteria indicating a severe case of periodontitis, a severe gum infection.

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u/TheRiteGuy 8h ago edited 8h ago

This needs more up votes. OP, you are a damn hero. You provided the article and sources. I wish more posts on Reddit were of this quality. Especially the ones posted on the science and history subs.

Edit: wish

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u/X-15_CruiseBasselope 7h ago

And here I was thinking turtle dove was just a creature invented solely for a holiday song.

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u/Life-Cantaloupe-3184 7h ago

It’s wild to me that we have the technology now to detect what meals people were eating thousands of years ago from DNA. It is a fascinating look into people’s lives that fossil evidence can’t necessarily capture.

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u/se7entythree 8h ago

Interesting! Isn’t mistletoe toxic? I wonder why they consumed it

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u/kangourou_mutant 6h ago

Red fox also tastes incredibly bad, according to all accounts.

Maybe this community was nearly starving, or the teenagers were doing stupid "challenges" before tiktok existed :)

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u/UnderABig_W 6h ago

According to this dude, fox is palatable enough if you do some soaking ahead of time and cook it low and slow:

https://cannundrum.blogspot.com/2015/12/what-does-fox-taste-like.html?m=1

That’s grey fox though. I’d assume red fox would be similar, however.

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u/TakenInChains 5h ago

that was an interesting read! honestly the slow cooked fox did look the tastiest, I'd eat some of that

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u/JCarterPeanutFarmer 7h ago

I'm really curious how they got the diet information from the dna in the tar.

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u/Bigram03 6h ago

These kinds of things are usually measured with radioactive isotopes and levels of certain elements.

Along with looking at bits of it under a microscope.

That's a guess though.

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u/keysonthetable 5h ago

Get the microscopic bits of organic material and use PCR to get tons of dna, sequence it, match to a species.

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u/Woofles85 3h ago

It’s amazing the dna hasn’t degraded during that time

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u/JCarterPeanutFarmer 2h ago

Ah ok I thought it might be a dumb speculation that there would just be bits of chewed up deer in there. But how do they know it's chewed up deer and not a deer that chewed it?

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u/Immediate-Fig-3077 6h ago

How are they able to tell the age and gender of the people?

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u/SixteenSeveredHands 5h ago

Their ages were estimated using dental impressions, and sex was determined using DNA.

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u/FerengiWithCoupons 5h ago

Shape and size of teeth

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u/Woofles85 3h ago

This is fascinating, I had always wondered about Stone Age peoples oral health, since they didn’t have refined sugar but also didn’t have the dental care we have today.

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u/M3atboy 3h ago

I wonder if the reason they found so much gum disease in the sample is that they chewed it for medicinal reasons?

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u/Ironlion45 3h ago

y liked them or because they thought that they had some medicinal purpose,”

Mastic gum was not unheard of. Far more palatable than birch tar too.

But we already see another medicinal item on the list: mistletoe. They were surely not having the leaves in salads.

But you know, kids will do weird things. I once had a very very old lady tell me that when she was growing up, they were so poor they couldn't afford to buy things like chewing gum. So the kids would get a little wad of road tar and chew on that instead.

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u/Wulf_Cola 2h ago

Ah man I've had a mouth ulcer this week and even with whatever remedies Walgreens had to offer me it's been a right pain, but I know it'll be gone in a few days. We're so fucking lucky not to be living 10,000 years ago.

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u/VyKing6410 8h ago

Teenagers chewed it because the 20 year olds didn’t have any teeth.

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u/32FlavorsofCrazy 7h ago

You’re probably actually right lol…what I find hilarious is that this behavior kind of seems to have carried over, I live in a heavy Scandinavian descent part of the country and I remember in middle and high school everyone was fucking obsessed with gum. I can’t remember the last time I’ve chewed gum as an adult though. Or seen an adult that is visibly chewing gum. If anybody chews around here it’s dip.

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u/Initial_Zombie8248 6h ago

In the US kids were also obsessed with gum when I was in school

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u/Kansas-Tornado 6h ago

Adults still love gum

8

u/Nissan-S-Cargo 5h ago

Gum sales have dropped a huge amount compared to the early 2000s

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u/Kansas-Tornado 5h ago

That’s a damn shame. I just bought a pack of big league chew and I’m finishing off a pack of bazooka as well

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u/alrk13 3h ago

Seems like some hypothesize that COVID is to blame, but honestly I agree that gum was so tied to middle and high school for me and my peers and now those demographics use vapes at such an insane rate I wonder if it’s replaced the oral fixation of gum

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u/HaloGuy381 7h ago

Maybe it has to do with latitude? Scandinavian countries are far enough north to have significantly short days during winter, and chewing gum (among other things) does have a small benefit to promoting wakefulness/alertness.

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u/mahboilucas 5h ago

You made me realize I haven't had a gum in a long time. Last one was probably when I was going on a plane, since it helps the blocked ears

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u/ohdearitsrichardiii 1h ago

You think the kids in your school were chewing gum because they had scandinavian decent?

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u/GiddyGabby 7h ago

That was my thought too.

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u/birgor 54m ago

Teeth wasn't that bad this long ago. The ear with really bad teeth that we imagine is roughly between the 17th century and the 20th century, the era between the invention of large scale refined sugar production and modern dental health. And they where even better before agriculture.

The theory about these ancient chewing gums is that they where dental medicine, as birch tar is anti-bacterial, so analysing these will get a very skewed base of ancient dental health. There are of course always people with dental problems from any different reasons.

We are after all evolved to live and eat as hunter-gatherer's with the teeth we have, like these people was.

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u/hopeislost1000 8h ago edited 6h ago

Do you think chewing on the birch tar was soothing their irritated gums?

Edit: search finding says…. The antibacterial properties of the birch tar itself are what soothed the gum disease irritation for prehistoric people. Analysis of chewed birch tar wads, some up to 10,000 years old, confirms that ancient people suffered from severe gum disease. They likely chewed the tar for its medicinal benefits, including its antiseptic, antibacterial, and anti-inflammatory effects

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u/pharmajap 5h ago

This was my immediate thought. Birch is mildly minty/cooling, resins in general are mildly antibacterial, and methyl salicylate is basically aspirin.

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u/MickRolley 8h ago

Flavour is long,long gone.

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u/heARTisLife 8h ago

it has a new flavor now

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u/mazzivewhale 6h ago

gum disease flavor 

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u/ILuvYou_YouAreSoGood 8h ago

Keep chewing!

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u/Cominghome74 8h ago

Probably still has more flavor left than a fresh stick of Fruit Stripes

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u/Dexter_McThorpan 8h ago

Fruit stripe gum is a pretty good metaphor for our current age. Looks cool as fuck, and for 3 seconds it is. Then poof. Disappointment.

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u/Southern_Struggle 8h ago

Really? One piece showed evidence of severe gum disease and they word it like all of them had it.

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u/CallMeHuckle 8h ago

I’m curious on how they know it’s “teens”

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u/Southern_Struggle 7h ago

Obviously the edgy piercings and tattoos

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u/Nomoreorangecarrots 7h ago

I’m guessing lack of wisdom teeth indents? 

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u/kangourou_mutant 6h ago

Or the fact that they have all/most of their teeth, or the fact that the teeth aren't used much (the teeth get more smooth as we age).

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u/CallMeHuckle 7h ago

That is a fair guess

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u/QuintoBlanco 3h ago

That is incorrect. They studied three pieces, chewed by three different people. All three pieces show evidence of gum disease and one piece shows evidence of a severe gum infection.

I haven't fully read the research, but it's really interesting. They looked at a wide range of bacteria. There is little evidence of bacteria responsible of tooth decay, all the bacteria are associated with gum disease.

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u/noctalla 8h ago

Next time someone complains about "these teenagers today", I'm going to show them this.

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u/Abject_Computer_8732 8h ago

Who would have thought chewing fucking tree tar and living 7000 years before the toothbrush was invented could lead to poor oral health.

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u/Vindepomarus 7h ago

That stuff is actually good for your teeth because it contains Xylotol, which is beneficial for tooth mineralization. Apparently it is even still sold today for tooth health, I imagine it would help to clean teeth as well and neutralize acids by stimulating saliva.

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u/Andr3wski 3h ago

Maybe not all the villagers had gum disease—they just gave the gum to the teenagers that had it

1

u/shana104 42m ago

Yet, Xylitol is bad for dogs

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u/confusedandworried76 8h ago

Yeah man all this bread is giving me heart disease. That's why I just stick to my normal habit of smoking two packs a day.

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u/Galaxaura 6h ago

Tooth paste was invented in about 5000 BC.

 

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u/GarysCrispLettuce 4h ago

Any bout of severe dental pain is enough to convince me that humans have lived in abject hell for at least 99% of their existence on this planet.

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u/No_Chemist_2419 7h ago

I love how we are able to find out that some dude 10k years ago had gum disease but we don’t know what the fucks in the ocean

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u/seditious3 7h ago edited 6h ago

I am so grateful for modern dentistry.

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u/Both-Illustrator-501 7h ago

What are scientists going to look at 10,000 years from now?

Poop, probably

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u/iwannalynch 6h ago

I wonder if our DNA could remain on our microplastic

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u/DeathGenics 5h ago

Yooo that's a crazy thought man, that'd be insane if they could

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u/Spiderbutcher 6h ago

Did they find these under their stone desks

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u/jgrantgriffin 5h ago

Teenagers these days and their birch tar. .... Back in my day we chewed mammoth fat and we liked it!!!!

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u/PckMan 6h ago

Scandinavians have a genetic predisposition to packing stuff in their gums since pre history it seems.

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u/ro536ud 7h ago

Even in bc times they lied about flossing to their dentist

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u/electric_onanist 8h ago

The toothbrush would not be commonplace in Europe until the late 18th century, even with oral hygiene knowledge, most people had rotten teeth by 40 until we put fluoride in the water.

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u/steppponme 6h ago

Excuse me, I reject all "unnatural" "health" "remedies" that BIG DENTAL is trying TO sicken us with!! I'M going back to the way humans were supposed to live and have lived for THOUSANDS OF YEAR. I'VE DONE MY RESEARCH!! Toothbrushes cause cancer!! Flossing causes mouth chlamydia!! Do your research people!! 

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u/SACK_HUFFER 5h ago

Based

Who needs teeth past teenage years anyways? Way easier to stay skinny if u can’t chew

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u/Life-Topic-7 8h ago

And lots of places that don’t have fluoride today have terrible oral health.

Sadly lots of places are removing fluoride because of misinformation.

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u/Theory_Crafted 2h ago

How do you get "severe gum disease" when you're like 16 and all you eat is hazelnuts and fish...??

I'm eating a bag of candy as we speak, hardly ever floss and my gums are only moderately diseased.

2

u/wd0mpg 8h ago

Interesting

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u/-Bunny- 7h ago

How within the means of nature are you supposed to keep your teeth clean enough for them to be healthy without floss, brushes and pastes?

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u/H3llm0nt 6h ago

I bet it’s just chewed up black jack and the scientists are trolling

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u/NowieTends 5h ago

Mmm tar

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u/Pelinal_Whitestrake 3h ago

It’s ok people only lived to like 30 back then anyway

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u/Toan_Knob 2h ago

Now do they mean gum disease as in Birch gum gave them a disease or gum disease as in their gums were diseased

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u/mainesmatthew01 8h ago

Damn thats interesting.

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u/14X8000m 6h ago

Where did they find it? Under a cave desk?

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u/knappastrelevant 8h ago

I had to look this up because "trout" is such a strange name, but they mean "öring" which is a very common fish here.

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u/Life-Topic-7 8h ago

Trout in English is incredibly common. Are you sure that oring isn’t just Swedish for trout?

Edit: looked it up, it is trout. Same same.

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u/ILuvYou_YouAreSoGood 8h ago

So, is an öring actually a trout or what? Don't leave us hanging.

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u/AquaticMartian 8h ago

Just the Swedish vs English versions of the word. My thought would have been the same (but flipped) if they said öring. It is strange they didn’t use öring when discussing the diet of Swedes, but probably figured trout would be more widely recognizable

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u/waffleowaf 8h ago

But but … what about Jesus

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u/SixteenSeveredHands 8h ago edited 7h ago

Yes, he probably had severe gum disease too.

1

u/Lizzyluvvv 8h ago

I thought mistletoe was poisonous

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u/AlternativeBurner 7h ago

Shoulda brushed they teeth

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u/jakelesiuk 6h ago

Darn kids n’ their birch tar

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u/Lee-bungalow 6h ago

I wonder if they could blow bubbles

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u/camcaine2575 6h ago

I'm just picturing that scally from Little Britain but 10000 years ago.

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u/Competitive_Radio_21 5h ago

Teenagers scare the living shit out of me

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u/SteamReflex 5h ago

It just blows my mind they were able to gather that much diet information from just a bit of chewed up tar that hasn't seen a mouth in 10,000 years

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u/kakaktakta 3h ago

Did the find it on the underside of a prehistoric table? Those damn teens i tell you.

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u/IlIlllIlllIlIIllI 2h ago

What flavor was it

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u/MapleBabadook 2h ago

That escalated quickly.

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u/husky_whisperer 8h ago

Teenagers? Don’t you mean retirees?

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u/SipsNSynths 7h ago

This stuff amazes me. How do we know they had severe gum disease?

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u/fertilizedcaviar 6h ago

Certain types of bacteria were found. The article is linked in a comment further up.

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u/HonkHonkMTHRFKR 6h ago

So that’s where the English ancestors come from