Foods from agricultural lifestyles may have made it easier to form some sounds

Definitely interesting -- I haven't read the paper so I can't comment too much, but I remember from my phonetics class in college that (IIRC) there isn't a language that pronounces labiodentals with the bottom teeth against the top lip, even though it's totally possible. The trend of overbites could help explain this?

Definitely nothing to read into wrt the deeper development of language, though -- having a greater variety of sounds doesn't actually correlate with any higher-level information density or anything (languages with smaller, easier to distinguish sound inventories that are less information-dense on a phonetic level are in turn pronounced faster -- see http://rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-vs...)

> For those living on a hunter-gatherer diet, overbites in the jaws and teeth in youth were often replaced in adulthood by what are called edge-to-edge bites, where front teeth sit atop one another. But with a softer diet, overbites may persist into adulthood.

This post from the other day goes into that aspect in more depth:

> Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up? (2017) (sapiens.org):

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19415973

After reading it, I was thinking if I have kids I'd try to feed them a tougher diet so they wouldn't have so many teeth and bite issues. Now, after reading this NYTimes article, I'm not so sure. The necessity of the cultural adaptation to these bite issues seem to be far more important than avoiding the negative anatomical changes that enabled them.

"Some sounds", submitter?

Don't eat so many beans!