Arguments over the diets of our paleolithic ancestors have raged for decades, but one thing is now certain, if any were vegetarian, they couldn’t have said so.

New research into the biting and phonetic ability of stone age humans has found that until the birth of farming some 10,000-years-ago, people could not pronounce the letters ‘v’ or ‘f’ - making the word 'farming' also a linguistic impossibility before the advent of agriculture.

And when things went wrong for our prehistoric forebears they definitely could not have used 'the f-word.'

The sounds, known as fricatives and labiodentals, can only be produced when the lower lip pushes against the upper teeth to form a slight hissing sound.

But the teeth of hunter-gathering humans used to meet in an edge-to-edge bite due to their meaty and fibrous diet, leaving them unable to form the consonants.

It wasn’t until the dawn of agriculture, which brought softer foods like rice and bread, that humans began to retain the juvenile overbite that had previously disappeared by adulthood.

Even then it took thousands of years for the jaw to change sufficiently to allow the new sounds to form and trigger the diverse lexicons of today’s languages.