Could it be more of a genetic thing to have straight teeth or are there outside factors involved too? Not to mention having crooked teeth can cause so many issues but it’s common.
In: 601
Some have speculated that smaller faces (relative to the same sized head) are due to sexual selection; humans like a small face. Small-face folks have more offspring, etc. Improved diets mean that there is not a big price to pay for having a smaller face, other than your teeth won’t fit, but modern dentistry and braces address this too.
Crooked teeth is mostly due to diet. Not evolution. If we compare to pre-human species, then evolution was a major role. As we became more bipedal, the center of weight of our skull had to be more aligned over our spine. This did cause the jaws to shrink compared to other great apes. It was also driving a gradual disappearance of wisdom teeth in the population.
However, if you compare the alignment of teeth in skulls from… 300+ years ago, you’ll notice almost all of the skulls have nearly perfectly aligned teeth. Compare that to now where a majority of the population have misaligned teeth or have had orthodontic treatment.
The big change is diet. For example, many historic societies would grind grains with some sort of stone tools. This introduced a lot of small stone gravel into the diet. It also did not produce as soft of grains as we have now. So instead of eating fairly soft white bread, they had a diet with more bran, stones and sand; which requires a lot more chewing. Likewise, our protein selection for young children is really quite soft. Things like hot dogs, ground meats, or well cooked meats. None of this is particularly hard to chew. Compare this to eating tendons or sometimes skins.
You can see a similar trend between modern populations. If you compare someone who grew up in an area with less processed foods, or they culturally have foods that require a lot of chewing, you’ll notice far less crowding in the teeth.
Basically, chewing more stimulates jaw growth. So a more coarse diet will result in larger jaws, which can better fit all the teeth. Keep in mind that the jaw is mostly done growing around age 12. So it really depends what you eat as a kid.
There’s a very good YouTube video that explain how increase in processed food leads to smaller pallets in children when then leads to over crowded/ crooked teeth im not sure if ill be able to find it but I can try
There was a dentist back in the 1930s named Weston A. Price. He travelled internationally and he found that western diets were more likely to cause tooth misalignment and weak jawlines. This was apparently due to the soft and sugary nature of said foods. On the contrary, the diets of the more primitive cultures he observed were more tough and fibrous which resulted in near perfect alignment and tooth health aside from inevitable wear and tear. Even more fascinating was when those primitive cultures adopted western diets, their teeth became noticeably worse within one generation. In his book, he actually showed pictures of families within those cultures and showed that the parents often had robust square jawlines with good teeth alignment while their children had misaligned teeth and weakened jawlines. The children had been more westernized than their parents. Example below:
https://www.ericdavisdental.com/facial-orthotropics-for-your-child/why-raise-unhealthy-children/how-our-ancestors-formed-full-faces-and-straight-teeth/Africa_500x373.jpg
As well as diet, I think there is some evidence that bottle feeding is more likely to lead to crooked teeth than is breast feeding. It should be interesting to see what studies show with there having been a resurgence in breastfeeding in recent decades. There were many decades where bottle feeding was considered the modern, scientific option and breastfeeding was not encouraged, so one would expect there to have been more crooked teeth formed by infants growing up on those decades.
The actual answer is this. Our jaws and heads for that matter are developing smaller than they’re suppose to. Which causes the crowding of teeth. Now the next question is. Why is it our jaws and heads are smaller than what they’re suppose to be. That I would like to point out a couple things. 1 anthropologists know when agriculture is being introduced to an area by simply looking at their teeth. There are other things as well, but that is a clear indicator. 2 no species of human has this over crowding, or at least safe to say not near the level of crowding when their diet is mostly meat. Inuits (actually full practicing Inuits, not Inuits that moved to anchorage) do not have this issue. Neither do other carnivorous practicing people. You don’t have to take my word for it. Look up the workings of Weston A Price.
Edit: I would like to add. The cause is malnutrition. Your future kids can mostly avoid dental work by eating nutrient dense and extremely bioavailable ruminant meats. Like we ate before.
Teeth and jaw development depend on your neck and spine and unfortunately since we sit a lot growing up we have a lot more deformity in these areas. Diet is unrelated people on south Asia who are rural farmers eating nothing but soft food have literally perfect teeth.
Evolution makes no sense until the last century this issue largely did not exist and had exploded in recent years particularly in the west.
because evolution only cares if you make it to breeding age so things don’t need to be perfect the car just needs to make it over the finish line
It used to be more common to loose teeth either from violence, accident, or bad diet and the common cure for a toothache was to just yank the tooth right out. In modern times, people tend to keep our teeth so sometimes we see people with more teeth than their jaw could hold.
If it didn’t prevent ancestral pre-humans from surviving or getting laid then it’s not a requirement in our DNA.
Latest Answers