ancient foods Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Did Ancient People Really All Have Horrible, Crooked, Rotten Teeth?

A certain notion that frequently shows up in popular culture and online claims that everyone in the premodern world all had absolutely disgusting, crooked, and totally rotten teeth. There is some truth to this perception. Modern orthodontic practice did not exist in the premodern world, so the majority of people probably did not have perfectly straight teeth. Additionally, across the board, most people in the premodern world generally had poorer dental hygiene than what is considered normal in most western developed countries in the twenty-first century. Some premodern people did indeed have extremely disgusting, disease-ridden, and rotten teeth.

Nonetheless, the popular perception ignores a great deal of contravening evidence. Some premodern people had naturally straight teeth, just as some people do today, and perfectly straight teeth with no gaps haven’t necessarily always been seen as desirable in all cultures. Additionally, premodern people did have an interest in keeping their teeth clean and they had methods of cleaning their teeth, albeit ones that are not as effective as those in widespread use today.

Finally, most premodern people’s teeth were not all totally rotted and falling out due primarily to the fact that they rarely or never consumed simple sugars, which are the primary cause of most tooth decay today. People who lived in areas close to the sea also tended to eat lots of seafood, which is high in fluoride, which may have helped to protect their teeth. Consequently, some ancient and medieval people actually had relatively nice-looking, healthy teeth even by twenty-first-century standards.

What Is the Correct Pronunciation of “Gyro”?

In the United States, there is something of an intense debate over how the word gyro is supposed to be pronounced. Many people pronounce it /ˈdʒaɪɹoʊ/ (or, to use fauxnetics, “JAI-roh’). Many other people, however, insist that it is supposed to be pronounced /ˈjiː.ɹoʊ/ (that is, “YEE-roh” in fauxnetics). This debate even made it into the recent Disney Pixar animated film Soul, which includes a flashback scene in which a mischievous unborn soul named “Twenty-Two” is portrayed as arguing with the spirit of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes (lived c. 287 – c. 212 BCE) over the correct pronunciation of the word.

If I were an ordinary pedant, I would simply tell you that the pronunciation /ˈjiː.ɹoʊ/ is correct and that the people who say /ˈdʒaɪɹoʊ/ are wrong. I, however, am no ordinary pedant. On the contrary, I am the most obnoxious and loathsome kind of pedant: a pedant who has spent years studying the Greek language at the university level and who knows far too much about it for my own good.

Therefore, I feel the need to point out that neither of the pronunciations given above is reflective of the actual pronunciation of the word in Modern Greek, since the nominative singular form of the word in Greek is actually γύρος (gýros), with an /s/ sound on the end, and the nominative plural form is actually γύροι (gýroi). Moreover, I feel the need to explain exactly why the way the word is spelled in English is so different from how it is pronounced in Greek and to explain precisely how the debate over the pronunciation of the word arose.

What Did People in the Paleolithic Really Eat?

The so-called “Paleolithic diet” is a fad diet, which advocates that people can lose weight and live healthier by eating the same foods our distant ancestors ate thousands of years ago during the Paleolithic Era, which lasted from the invention of stone tools roughly 3.3 million years ago until the Agricultural Revolution around 12,000 years ago. This diet originated in the 1970s and was popularized in the 2000s, primarily by the bestselling American writer Loren Cordain.

The Paleolithic diet is predicated on what is known as the “genetic discordance hypothesis,” which holds that, while the environment in which human beings live and the foods human beings eat have drastically changed since the end of the Paleolithic Era, the human genome has hardly changed at all. Therefore, proponents of the diet insist that human beings are not adapted to eat the foods we are now eating and we must return to eating the foods our ancestors ate over 12,000 years ago.

This diet claims that people should eat a diet that consists of meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and roots. People on the diet are usually prohibited from eating any grains, dairy products, sugars, legumes, salts, oils, alcohol, or caffeine, since, according to proponents of the diet, these are foods that did not exist during the Paleolithic Era. Unfortunately for practitioners of the diet, it actually bears very little resemblance to what people during the Paleolithic Era actually ate.