Humans had rotten teeth before farming

Anthropologists have long thought that tooth decay only became common in humans about 10,000 years ago,when humans began farming- and eating starchy crops that fed sugar-loving bacteria on their teeth. But Isabelle De Groote of the Natural History Museum in London and her colleagues have found widespread tooth decay in hunter-gatherers that lived several thousand years before the origin of agriculture. Her team found a that more than half of the teeth found were decayed, a prevalence of dental disease similar to that of modern industrial societies with diets high in refined sugars.