I thought the current thinking was that ancient humans had a lot more chewing they had to do to eat their food, which as a child pressured the jaws into being larger, which gave you space as an adult for your wisdom teeth.
Also nobody mentions all the starchy stuff and the fruit our ancestors ate. It's just odd how people reinterpret the entire history of our species based on recent dietary fads.
Honestly our ancestors probably ate anything possible that was around. Probably a lot of half spoiled meat that you just ate if you came upon it and barely nutritious plant matter just to fill the belly. Surviving is insanely difficult, you don't know where your next meal is coming from, and you will take that rotting animal vs being hungry. I imagine cooking too didn't always happen. We take the logistics needed for cooking for granted, perhaps in ancient times it was easier to eat some raw/semispoiled flesh if you found it just to keep moving vs lingering around for too long in one area. Violence was also widespread then as it has been all through history, so being in a position where you can establish a camp for a few hours and advertise a cooking fire in the immediate area must have been quite a luxury.
Almost all of this is... Not accurate. It pains me to say it, but this reads like Hollywood fiction. Most groups of people weren't living under constant threat of starvation or violence. Groups that badly located, or that badly divided, didn't tend to last. Additionally, if you're living in high stress, births become less successful.
Things took more effort, and had slightly lower skill caps, but only slightly. Humans are still human - if things are too hard, they went elsewhere.
Yeah, heat will kill all germs and break down most toxins given off by bacteria so if food isn't plentiful it would be hard to turn down a day or two old carcass just lying around. However I don't think eating half rotten RAW meat is a good idea at all. humans simple don't have the capability for that like wolves and to a much greater extend buzzards/vultures and would quite likely die from toxins given off by the bacteria.
If you read the article, you’ll see fruit is mentioned multiple times, including the frequency of its consumption. There is no mention of dietary fads.
I don't think an extra molar at age 16 is going to let you survive after all your other teeth have fallen out. I would guess the wisdom teeth are either waiting for your jaw to mature or are in the process of devolving to never erupt at all.
That's not really how evolution works. There's no reason that modern humans would ever lose wisdom teeth unless NOT having them led to some evident increase in ability to produce healthy children in abundance.
With the advent of dental care, that seems unlikely to ever happen by evolution.
The process of devolving to never erupt at all would have started long before modern dental care, driven by impaction complications or pressure to appear neotenous with a small jaw. I agree it won't continue.