The Young Woman Found In An Idaho Gravel Quarry — And The 12,500-Year-Old Burial That Complicated The Clovis Story
She survived these episodes.
The bones grew again.
But the episodes accumulated as a record of the fragility of life in a world without agriculture, without preserved surplus, without the safety nets that even early agricultural communities began to develop.
The tooth wear pattern — heavy, from grit incorporated in processed food — tells the same kind of story from a different angle.
She was eating food that had been processed on stone tools — ground or pounded — and the stone particles left their mark.
The cooked-food wear pattern is consistent with food that was prepared before eating, which is consistent with what we know about other early western North American peoples.