Stone Age chewing gum holds clues to the life of a girl who lived 5700 years ago

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/17/world/ancient-chewing-gum-genome-scn/index.html

by dsr12 • 7 years ago

54 8 7 years ago

edition.cnn.com

Pigo2• 7 years ago

I guess it was naive of me, but I was really hoping for an image of the girl. Even a reasonable guess can be pretty interesting sometimes.

When you see that image of what King Tutankhamun most likely looked like, it's kind of jarring.

nannal• 7 years ago

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/191217110819-02-ancen...

Pigo2• 7 years ago

There's a lot of images on the article, but most of them seem to be links to other articles. Was that slideshow specific to this article? The first image seemed to be a skull that was completely unrelated.

thrower123• 7 years ago

These reconstructions are mostly nonsense, especially in these cases where they don't even have a complete skull to work from.

citilife• 7 years ago

Interesting bit of knowledge I gained from the article is that it's believed we only gained the ability to digest milk recently. Prior to that all humans were lactose intolerant.

stevenwoo• 7 years ago

I believe they meant all humans older than infants - adult onset lactose intolerance, otherwise it implies human lactation is a recent evolutionary trait that was reacquired or mothers made milk but their babies could not drink it.

jvrossb• 7 years ago

The term lactose intolerant is commonly used as shorthand for adult onset.

Scaevolus• 7 years ago

One theory for the incredibly rapid spread of lactose tolerance is that during times of famine, lactose intolerant people in Northern Europe would drink fresh milk (out of desperation) and the resultant diarrhea would weaken them even more.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/12/27/168144785/an...

Stone Age chewing gum holds clues to the life of a girl who lived 5700 years ago

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