"Doesn’t seem like a great way to tell the age of a skull."
The confidence of people far away at a different time without any relevant knowledge to dismiss an experienced local on the ground based on flawed high-level logic never ceases to surprise.
I don't actually read his comment as dismissive or confident, but more surprised and curious. There's nothing wrong with questioning other people's statements when they don't marry up with your own opinions.
Since when does an anecdote provide any proof? I thought exactly the same things as your parent poster. Carbs are sugar, especially if you chew long enough. This affects teeth. Combine this with a lack of toothbrushes and a lack of fluoride and it sounds like a recipe for tooth decay.
Also, people didn’t live as long as they do now. So less chance to have your teeth rotten. Furthermore: the skeletons might have been of people in their twenties with arguably better teeth than old people.
Lots of questions that this anecdote doesn’t answer and you dismiss critique as pretentious.
It's the epitome of hacker news. Reddit also has this "armchair quarterbacking" effect, but it's significantly worse on HN, in my opinion.
A lot of the people here are knowledgeable—in specific domains. I think people forget that being an expert in one thing doesn't make you qualified to judge, understand, or discuss another domain in depth.
Case in point, the recent "tech that reduces sound by 94%" post that got upvoted here.
One of the most common instances of generalized experts weighing in on topics they're not actually experts in happens in politically-related posts here, although it usually only comes in the form of downvotes.
You can cite science and demographic facts while leaving out your own overt normative opinions, yet you will still get downvoted from both 'sides' who think they are being slighted if you don't give a clear opinion. Unfortunately this is the way scientific method-driven experts talk (and generally anyone who's into political science rather than political opinion) - but in this domain it really sets non-experts off for some reason.
The thing is, most people are taught at a young age that their political opinion matters a lot, which probably has something to do with generalized experts walking into this domain thinking they're already experts and getting quickly frustrated when they realize they're not, lashing out at the source of that frustration via downvotes.
Back in the day the responses to these kinds of topics used to be via comments, now it's almost always via drive-by downvotes. I used to bemoan the inane buzzword replies back in the forum days because they were typically boring and predictable, but they were still infinitely better than the downvote without comment that is the norm for this site (and even more common on reddit).
>> 8. The USA is primarily at "One Dollar = One Vote".
> Why Is There So Little Money In Politics
> In this paper, we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy-buying, but are rather a form of political participation and consumption. We summarize the data on campaign spending, and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals, not special interests, are the main source of campaign contributions. Moreover, we demonstrate that campaign giving is a normal good, dependent upon income, and campaign contributions as a percent of GDP have not risen appreciably in over 100 years – if anything, they have probably fallen. We then show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators’ votes. Finally, we illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects, there is little relationship between money and legislator votes. Thus, the question is not why there is so little money politics, but rather why organized interests give at all. We conclude by offering potential answers to this question
Long story short, the 30 year review and analysis states that rich people (those that pay their senators/congresscritters) get their laws passed, even when rejected by the bulk of the common person. And yet popular nonrich-popular laws are regularly dismissed without a consideration.
1$ = 1 vote. It happens at the regulatory level, the bill level, and the vote level. That's corruption no matter how you frame it.
I have no doubt that you can tell the age of a skull with a close inspection of the teeth. This story was an anthropologist looking at remains from several feet away and claiming that it’s aboriginal from the lack of dental decay.
I proposed a few exceptions to that rule. Certainly not a quip about the expertise of the anthropologist, but rather the accuracy of the story.
One of the benefits of being an expert in a particular field, is that you can take small parcels of evidence and formulate an accurate picture of a situation much faster than a layman with no prior experience in that field. I don't know the anthropologist in question, but I am sure she used a series of supporting evidence that was obvious to her trained eye as well as the teeth condition.
Ask any doctor or midwife who can look at an ultrasound image and tell you the sex of the baby while you are still staring at a smudgy grey moving image. Ask any accident investigator who can estimate the speed and trajectory of the vehicles while you are still looking for the skid marks.
I personally have spent over 25 years interacting on public message boards, and I am a domain expert enough that I can pick an armchair expert who has lots of perceived theoretical knowledge, but little or no real world knowledge, but still feels the need to espouse their opinion in order to get their dopamine hit of the day - all just from a quick glance at their post.
However, I have listened to a talk by a lady (she consults on murdered cadavers) who can tell which season a body died in by analyzing the teeth! Apparently there is a lot there.
That I can believe, assuming a detailed analysis in a lab. But snap judging from a distance? Cavities are more common in modern populations than before, but hardly omnipresent. I do find it an amusing thought that apparently my skeleton would be assigned a more distant past simply because I am filling free. :D
The more likely sign is not fillings, but acid damage, which softens teeth and cause biting and grinding to wear down the surface of the teeth. You can have no fillings and still have very noticeable acid-related damage.
Scientists examined the remains of 52 adults who had lived between roughly 12,000 and 13,000 B.C. and were buried in the cave. An astonishing 49 of them, or 94%, had cavities, which affected more than half of the surviving teeth.
By analyzing plant remains in the cave, Humphrey's team found that residents ate lots of a particularly sweet type of acorn, which becomes soft and sticky when cooked. They also ate wild oats and legumes. Such foods can lead to serious decay,
Are you trying to imply that refined sugars do not cause an increase in tooth decay? Or that fruit sugar is similar to refined sugars?
Any ties with the sugar lobbby famous for lobbying the US government into blackmailing the WHO in increasing the amounts “healthy” sugar in their dietary guidelines?
"Refined sugar" is sugar in fruit. It is literally the same thing. That's how we get sugar in the first place - from plants. You are dealing with glucose, fructose, and sucrose in both cases.
It’s not refined while it’s in the fruit. High content, but not refined.
Even with oranges which have very high sugar content, you cannot easily eat four oranges but you can drink their orange juice along with most of the sugar and none of the fiber.
The sugar lobby’s talking points steer the conversation toward equalizing refined and non refined sugars, and calories from refined sugars vs calories from non refined sugars.
> Doesn’t seem like a great way to tell the age of a skull.
Going to take a guess and say that a brief glance at the teeth is probably not the _only_ age determination method they applied before determining their course of action.
Right, and then after making that initial assessment, I'm going to guess they didn't just stop walking, write out and sign the incident report and pull out the radio to let the station know that they were pretty much done here and there's nothing to worry about. No, I assume they walked up to it and got a more conclusive look at the body first.
To expand on (1.), modern cultivated fruit varieties are quite different from what wild fruits are seasonally available—for one thing, you're always competing with wild animals for a sugary, tasty snack.
The conclusion to me seems to be that unless you're in the tropics, you almost certainly be eating less fruit, and the fruit you'll eat will be much more varied and seasonal. A lot of the wild fruit you eat may have specific defenses (tannins, alkaloids, etc.) that discourage you from eating too much (the fruit's job is to make you spread and excrete its seeds, after all).
1. They really are no sugar in aboriginal societies? No fruit or carbs?
2. I know a handful of people who eat Western diets who have zero tooth decay.
Doesn’t seem like a great way to tell the age of a skull.