According to recent studies from South America, poor dental cleanliness is allowing researchers to discover what people may have included in their diet thousands of years ago.
Using modern techniques, the scientists have scraped plaque from the teeth of people who lives just over 9,000 years ago. The scraps have allowed them to form a picture of the ancient diets . The plaque includes cultivated crops, beans, squash and beans.
The report was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and conducted by experts at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Initiative and the National Museum of National History.
One researcher was reported as saying: "Some teeth were dirtier than others. We found starch grains on most of the teeth. About a third of the teeth contained large numbers of starch grains."
Unclean teeth indicate primitive diet
Fri, 05 Dec 2008
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