plucked baby teeth early to make space for adult teeth, but every single teeth of mine still ended up being crooked…
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Human beings grow according to expression of genes responsible for each stage of our development. But like any other ordered system which unfolds in discrete stages, if preconditions vary, then so will the results.
Thus, while the series of steps needed for teeth to grow are the same from person to person, slight variations in head size or jaw shape can cause teeth to not perfectly line up. It is only within the last 100 years or so that dentistry has been able to effectively straighten crooked teeth. Before then, people just lived with crooked teeth.
There are some biological/anthropological theories out there postulating that so many folks need braces in Modernity because our food is so soft and rich that it requires much less work to chew compared to the foods of our ancestors.
If our caveman ancestors were chewing every last bit of meaty gristle and cartilage they could find in order to survive, then they probably spent a lot longer working their jaw muscles each and every day than we do with a tender Wagyuu steak, and that exercise made the muscles bigger and stronger. Those bigger denser muscles would be constantly pushing and pulling on their jaws as they age which – even though the effect would be very very small – would continuously affect your bone morphology as you grow and age.
The theory goes that our cavemen ancestors had straight teeth because that amount of jaw exercise was what the body’s bone-and-teeth development environment was evolved to properly work in… and our modern “lack of exercise” for our jaws affects our jaw development similarly to how near-total lack of walking and running exercise would affect a child’s leg-bone development.
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