Hopeful Monster wrote:I recently opted not to get my wisdom teeth removed. We will see if I get selected out.

As the authors state, their results resolve what otherwise might seem like inconsistencies between what our teeth can handle and our gracile jaw musculature. We might not have the heavy jaws and massive muscles of Paranthropus, but we are more efficient biters, allowing us to exert high bite forces with a different anatomical arrangement. The lineage of hominins of which we are a part did not slowly lose their ability to bite hard as had previously been supposed, but, interestingly, our jaws are not well-suited to sustaining high bite forces for a long time. In other words, our jaws are capable of cracking open something like a nut or hard fruit which requires brief exertion of high bite forces, but they are not well-adapted to doing something like chewing on tough plant food for a long period of time. This raises some interesting questions about the inferred diets of extinct humans, and by utilizing similar modeling techniques paleontologists may be able to determine whether hominins were adapted to deliver short, strong bites, were chewing hard foods which took a longer amount of time to process, or were doing something different.