Many of us have had crooked, ill-fitting teeth at some point in our lives. The reason has a lot to do with what we eat.
We hold in our mouths the legacy of our evolution. We rarely consider just how amazing our teeth are. They break food without themselves being broken, up to millions of times over the course of a lifetime; and they do it built from the very same raw materials as the foods they are breaking. Nature is truly an inspired engineer.
Other animals tend to have perfectly aligned teeth. Our distant hominin ancestors did too; and so do the few remaining peoples today who live a traditional hunting and gathering lifestyle. I am a dental anthropologist at the University of Arkansas, and I work with the Hadza foragers of Africa’s Great Rift Valley in Tanzania. The first thing you notice when you look into a Hadza mouth is that they’ve got a lot of teeth.
Selection for jaw length is based on the growth expected, given a hard or tough diet. In this way, diet determines how well jaw length matches tooth size. It is a fine balancing act, and our species has had 200,000 years to get it right. The problem for us is that, for most of that time, our ancestors didn’t feed their children the kind of mush we feed ours today. Our teeth don’t fit because they evolved instead to match the longer jaw that would develop in a more challenging strain environment.
Crowded, crooked, misaligned, and impacted teeth are huge problems that have clear aesthetic consequences, but can also affect chewing and lead to decay. Half of us could benefit from orthodontic treatment. Those treatments often involve pulling out or carving down teeth to match tooth row with jaw length. But does this approach really make sense from an evolutionary perspective? Some clinicians think not.
South Africa Latest News, South Africa Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Humans are to blame for the extreme weather that broiled London --- here's just how muchHuman-derived climate change dramatically upped the odds of record-shattering heat, says a study from World Weather Attribution.
Read more »
Why Extreme Heat Is So Bad for the Human BodyHere’s what you need to know about the health risks of extreme heat and how to understand your own risk
Read more »
NPR Cookie Consent and Choices
Read more »
‘Luck’ Review: John Lasseter’s Return to Animation Is a Convoluted Mess That Lacks MagicStarring Eva Noblezada, Simon Pegg, and Jane Fonda, 'Luck' has too many MacGuffins and not enough joy.
Read more »
Why Women Are Slow To Embrace EVsThis article reviews the different reasons why women are slow to embrace EVs and why that hesitancy is slowly changing.
Read more »
How do we tell our employees we’re laying off 30 of them?Workplace advice: Let your employees know why you made the layoff decisions during an all-hands meeting, but don’t discuss why you laid off one employee and not another.
Read more »