It’s interesting realising that Stone Age people had their own version of Wrigley’s.

It has the mind wander and wonder whether there was any chewy etiquette involved; any kind of Paleo-Meso-Neo-lithic protocols in place. Any guidelines for chewing gum’s polite handling and disposal so that hair and tools remained completely gum-free. How available was it? And when it was done, did they spit it or stick it? Was it chewed loudly, proudly and demonstratively?

It’s a question that immediately evokes the obnoxious Violet Beauregarde, bratty chewing gum champ of bloated blueberry fame in the film version of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Last seen being rolled into the juicing room by Oompa Loompas.

If nothing else, there’s certainty that ancient chewing gum didn’t taste like tomato soup, roast beef and blueberry pie.

Whatever the chewing gum etiquette Stone Age society may or may not have had five thousand years ago, evolutionary psychologists favour the idea that our human moral attitudes are rooted in the cognitive modules that evolved during this two-and-a-half millennia period of history. Issues of social interaction had to be solved; like problems of how to benefit from exchange and cooperation while avoiding being duped. Or knowing who to help, who to fight, and when to do it.

Evidenced by the high genetic similarities of human populations worldwide, and under the premise that evolution is necessarily slow, the generally accepted view is that neuropsychological function has remained essentially unchanged.

From a layman’s perspective, this seems to be the backing fabric of the ‘hard-wired’ reasoning for why, in the continuing tapestry of human life, we still kill each other and destroy things when changed conditions and intellectual enlightenment suggest it should be otherwise.

There is the rare argument of evolutionary rollback – the phenomenon of whatever’s non-functioning (an organ, usually) eventually atrophies or disappears – making it possible that humans don’t have as much internal machinery for moral actions as Evolutionary Psychology likes to believe. Certainly there’s embedded cognition (that spares us the task of complex processing) but it may be that we rely much more on external influences as the guide to how we act and react.

Social media seems a good illustration of that.

TikTok and YouTube certainly have chewy sway: all of a sudden chewing rock hard gum is the go for Gen Z boyz. (It’s not spelled that way and should be so I did. Consider it external influence.)

Marketed as ‘Facial Fitness’ chewing gum, its promise is that jawlines can be chiselled and bulked in a matter of weeks by munching and crunching on gum that’s about 15 times harder than the conventional kind.

Snappy brand names like ‘Rockjaw’, ‘Jawliner’ and ‘GumBells’ and a price you could choke on don’t have dentists believing they’re particularly safe, or even effective. One cosmetic dentist mother made her 15-year-old son throw his out.

There’s little proof that chewing gum can actually change someone’s appearance. Dentists interviewed by The New York Times maintain that any visible effects would be minor, and temporary. A US dentist who often treats TMJ disorders, estimates she has around three enquiries a month from teenage boys about hard gum. Others have attended her clinic with jaw pain and damaged fillings – most likely caused by this craze of crazy chewing.

Were any of this to be found in archeological digs in the year 7024, the future story it would tell is nothing short of an ancient merging of marketing mayhem and masculine madness.

Rewinding those 6,000 years back to now, recent explorations have uncovered gum from almost 6,000 years ago.

No human remains were found at this particular site in Sytholm, Denmark. What was found however, was a wad of birch pitch gum, that appears to have been spat on the ground during the end of the Mesolithic and beginning of the Neolithic periods.

Birch pitch is a browny, black substance that had been used as an adhesive for fitting the handle to a cutting edge for at least 30,000 years prior to this gum find, and it’s made by heating birch bark.

Finding remnants of ancient gum is not as unusual as it may seem – many lumps of this organic material have been found in sites across the world. While its use is still debated, it’s often found with tooth marks in it indicating it was chewed. Since the pitch hardens when it cools, it’s widely presumed that it was chewed to regain its pliability.

With one of the main constituents of birch pitch being betulin, which has antiseptic properties, there’s evidence of its medicinal uses including for the prevention and treatment of dental issues and ailments.

While birch pitch finds are not uncommon at all, what’s astounding about this specific piece is how incredibly well preserved it is.

So much so, that it’s the very first time researchers have been able to extract such detailed information from anything other than bones and teeth. A full genome has been sequenced, and the DNA held so robustly in that gum gives us a view of its chewer as if we had a telescope pointing back in time.

The identification of this female of non-specified age places her more closely related to Western European hunter-gatherers, than the farmers who had recently settled in the region. She had dark skin, blue eyes and black hair. The most recent meal she’d eaten laid traces in the gum – hazelnuts, and duck.

Her oral microbiome showed that she had the Barr-Epstein virus which means she would have at some time suffered the fatigue, rash and swollen glands of mononucleosis. This glandular fever is commonly known as the ‘kissing disease’ because it’s spread by saliva or sexual contact, but infection can also occur with the simple act of sharing utensils. It’s a virus that can be spread up to eighteen months after the initial onset of symptoms.

Several species of streptococci were also present in the birch pitch, indicative of urinary tract, skin and sinus infections, and even endocarditis being in her health history. Another group of bacteria found strongly suggests that she also suffered from severe periodontal disease.

The radiocarbon dating, chemical analysis and DNA sequencing of this ancient gum gives crucial microbial information on not only the composition of our ancestral oral microbiome, but the evolution of specific oral microbes and human pathogens.

Wads of the same type of gum were found next to bones in 1994 at the 9,700-year-old Huseby Klev archaeological site north of Gothenburg in western Sweden. As one of the country’s oldest human fossil sites, several of the birch pitch samples were chewed by teenagers – both male and female. The degree of oral disease revealed by one particular piece used by an adolescent girl, carried the strong probability that shortly after chewing the gum, she would have started losing her teeth.

If history repeats itself, that could be Gen Z boyz.

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