| The first thing I'd do is determine which field(s) would have insight into the answer. It's a question about human anatomy/physiology, diet, and evolution (adaptation). So, biology and specifically biological anthropology would be good fields to start with. If you use an academic search engine like Google Scholar, look for papers or textbooks in the field of biological anthropology (also called physical anthropology), human evolutionary biology, and primate biology. Even though the question is easy to express in plain English, often scientific topics are discussed in technical vocabulary. In biology and anthropology, "dentition" is used as a technical term for the configuration of teeth in the evolutionary context. Also, you'll probably want to expand your search to include human ancestors (hominids/hominins). Ultimately, rephrasing your search with some more technical language will me more likely to return science-based results. The keywords /hominid diet evolution dentition/ will get you more valuable info. TO ANSWER THE QUESTION ITSELF: In great apes (our clade), tooth shape is not reliably predictive of diet. Chimpanzees have large canines but are mostly frugivorous, yet they also hunt and eat meat. Gorillas have huge canines but eat mostly leaves. The biggest change in human dental morphology over our evolutionary history is the decreased robusticity of our jaws and jaw muscles. Our jaws have become a lot smaller than those of our ancestors, and our teeth have become smaller as well. However, this change coincided with the development of hunting, food processing, and cooking, which profoundly improved the nutritional quality of hominid diets. A wolf or lion needs large canines and carnassial teeth to kill prey and eat raw meat off the bone. Humans have technology to assist with this, and thus there has been reduced selection pressure on our teeth to accomplish these tasks. Our jaw shape reconfiguration may also be an important structural precondition of frontal brain growth, and the paleontological record shows an inverse correlation between jaw size and cranial size over time. Hominids hunted and ate meat. There is substantial paleontological evidence that meat has been a part of human diets for as long as our genus has existed. Our small teeth are fine for the job because we have knives to cut with and fire to cook with. All of this, as I'm sure you know, is completely irrelevant to the moral question of meat eating today. But it is a wrongheaded argument by vegetarians to suggest that our physiology is not up to the task. Every single indigenous culture eats meat. |
But my question is not really about: should humans eating meat? I know we eat meat(in general). I know it made us who we are, and we are all gonna die.
My question is rather. It is a question people ask, and the answer from our modernday oracles is honestly bullshit.
So who to ask? Yes Google Scholar used to pop up. It does not any more. I/we have to know.
And honestly again I no longer really trust any of Googles/abc's products.
So let me try to rephrase.
Where would normal people like my self seek information, without knowing the correct lingo in advance?
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16990