Softer Foods Have Changed How We Talk

Dental changes allow new sounds While the teeth of humans used to meet in an edge-to-edge bite due to their harder and tougher diet at the time, more recent softer foods allowed modern humans to retain the juvenile overbite that had previously disappeared by adulthood, with the upper teeth slightly more in front than the lower teeth. This shift led to the rise of a new class of speech sounds now found in half of the world’s languages: labiodentals, or sounds made by touching the lower lip to the upper teeth, for example when pronouncing the letter “f”. https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/softer-foods-have-changed-how-we-talk-316773?utm_campaign=NEWSLETTER_TN_Breaking%20Science%20News&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=70816604&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--kEZdWLdK5c55ezmF15yVJvxsvk_7xzHhL5a-Uqhw4RxVoHYCzyQDm17fVoxBPSssLtpNCZQo8TQMdHVsGv8fYiPCU1A&_hsmi=70816604