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Pre-dentistry, a bunch of your teeth would have fallen out before your wisdom teeth came in. There would have been space for the wisdom teeth so they wouldn't need to come in sideways.
We used to have larger mouths, they've been shrinking as we evolved
they’ve been shrinking as we
evolvedchanged our dietNo genetic changes (evolution) happened. If as children we ate only very tough meat and lots of chewy vegetables - no bread or rice or potato softness - our same genetics would result in much larger adult jaws.
Gonna feed my kid nothing but well-done steaks and tree bark for the jaw gainz.
That's right, my bad
I haven’t had my wisdom teeth extracted because my doctor said my mouth was big enough. The only real issue is brushing them so I have to clench my mouth almost shut to even reach them while brushing.
I never got all the fun drugs though.
Are you sure about that? We lost so many teeth after the industrialisation of sugar production (machines and slavery) but I'm not sure how bad it was before then.
Not cleaning teeth is pretty bad for teeth.
Teeth used to get cleaned by means of chewing harder food regularly, and they needed less cleaning to start with due to a lot less sugar in those foods though
So I searched it up. Food that was more abrasive, no refined carbs, more fibrous, more meat, less grain, more tannins. And ancient toothbrushes from frayed twigs, which also contained natural antimicrobials!
Thanks for prompting this educational exchange!
And our teeth really went downhill after we started reproducing without the quality check provided by survival of the fittest. The remains of hunter gatherers generally have very nice teeth.
I don't follow the logic. Human teeth would be better if more children died? That "quality check" only applies if an organism dies before mating, which happens usually around teenage years for humans.
Maybe those hunter gatherers had better teeth because of what they ate. There seems to be too many other potential factors to simply pawn it off on Darwinism.
In a study published in the latest Nature Genetics, Cooper and his research team looked at calcified plaque on ancient teeth from 34 prehistoric human skeletons. What they found was that as our diets changed over time — shifting from meat, vegetables and nuts to carbohydrates and sugar — so too did the composition of bacteria in our mouths.
However, the researchers found that as prehistoric humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming, certain types of disease-causing bacteria that were particularly efficient at using carbohydrates started to win out over other types of "friendly" bacteria in human mouths. The addition of processed flour and sugar during the Industrial Revolution only made matters worse.
Nah.
There seems to be a genetic variation that eliminates some or all wisdom teeth. It arose in Asia so long ago that the people who populated North and South America also had it. And in most populations it is still not very prevalent (less than 50%). Despite having been around for ages.
My mom only had the lower two wisdom teeth, none on top.
This reads like dentistry from the 1800s. You would've been a great dentist there. "I need to pull these teeth to make space for what's to come".