Dental calculus?

1. What is dental calculus? What are the advantages of studying dental calculus versus traditional skeletal remains? What unique insights into the lives of our ancestors can we glean from applying DNA sequencing and protein mass spectrometry technologies to dental calculus? Warinner also finishes her Ted Talk with a funny remark about thinking twice before brushing your teeth, which made me think of another prompt. Beyond the relative lack of dental calculus in modern humans (15-30mg) versus more “ancient” (up to 600mg) humans, in what other ways are we now acting or behaving that actually minimize our cultural footprint in history, ie how much information future generations will be able to collect about our lives (excluding access to the internet, where everything seems to be stored nowadays) 2. In chapter 12, we learn the adaptive significance of human variation, it helps human change some human characters in long time or short time to adapt the environment. The significance includes homeostasis, acclimatization, selective advantages of dark skin, etc.