Ungar describes how a tooth's "foodprints"--Distinctive patterns of microscopic wear and tear--provide telltale details about what an animal actually ate in the past. These clues, combined with groundbreaking research in paleoclimatology, demonstrate how a changing climate altered the food options available to our ancestors, what Ungar calls the biospheric buffet. When diets change, species change, and Ungar traces how diet and an unpredictable climate determined who among our ancestors was winnowed out and who survived, as well as why we transitioned from the role of forager to farmer. By sifting through the evidence--and the scars on our teeth--Ungar makes the important case for what might or might not be the most natural diet for humans.
"Peter Ungar is an extremely big name in the very specialist field of dental anthropology. You can get even more specific than biological anthropology and do specifically teeth, which is actually what I do. That is my highly specialist academic subject. So there’s quite a bit of teeth reading in this list but I think it’s in a very good cause. Very few people realize how interesting teeth are. This book really goes through the major topics from one of the top names in the field, and it’s very accessible. He’s been there when discoveries were made and he made some of the discoveries himself. That first-person aspect really brings out how exciting some of the research into what our ancestors ate is, how that changed the way we lived, and how that got us to be the species that we are. He is an expert in the foods we ate. He has an incredible array of scientific techniques for reconstructing what hominid species and even our earlier ancestors, millions of years ago, would have eaten. He can look at scratches on teeth and tell you whether they’re from leaves or nuts, and what this would have meant in terms of the environments our ancestors lived in, and what happened when they changed their diet. In the book, he essentially goes through all of the things that we can know, given the various techniques we have to understand evolution. He looks at changes, for instance, from largely grass-eating species to species that ate leaves, nuts, and other things like fruit—essentially, frugivores—to the omnivorous types of animals that we now are with our impressive array of meat eating skills that may well not have been present in our earlier ancestors."
