Ancient man had teeth the size of a man's thumb and a jaw bone 4 times as thick as ours today. The time you weren't hunting and gathering, you were sitting there chewing. There was a lot of chewing, is what I'm saying. Imagine eating celery for every meal, only way tougher. The fruit of our ancestors was barely sweet, had thick, tough skins and was extremely fibrous.
the food of today has been bred for thousands of years to be soft and full of sugars. Tubers, stems, leaves, raw meat if you could get it, tough-skinned fruits. The diet of early man was diverse indeed, but it all had one thing in common - it was super damned hard to chew. Before we cooked and processed the food we found and hunted, we had to eat it raw. This is because the early humans spent, literally, 6 hours every single day, chewing. If you look at all the failed Homo species (and there are many) you will find that they all have something in common. It was only about 1 million years ago that humanity first started cooking food.
because just think of how the ability to clearly and precisely communicate with each other has changed humanity. A strange evolutionary tactic, but one that has paid off in spades. We can talk with each other with great complexity, but we are the only animal that risks choking on our own food because of it. The larynx elongated, pulling further down the esophagus and creating the risk that swallowed food had a chance of entering our windpipe. Our necks grew longer and our tongues became more flexible.and grew from further down. About 100,000 years ago our mouths started getting smaller and protruding less. but something that is unique is that this ability came with a risk. Why is that?A very interesting thing about our species is the quality of the sounds we make. These animals have not achieved the same level of dominance as Homo Sapien has, however. After all, almost all animals have some kind of communicative skill - vocal or chemical or just body language. On the surface, this might not seem as important as some of the other things on this list.