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.
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Because momma didn’t feed their children cartilage and raw vegetables. Instead they ate peanut butter jelly’s and cheeseburgers
We have soft shitty diets, which leads to poor oral and body posture. Our sentient lifestyles also wreck posture. The cumulative effect is that our jaws don’t become developed and wide enough to accommodate all your teeth, so they crowd and most people have wisdom tooth problems.
It can be corrected to an extent through proper tongue and body posture changes, and chewing hard gum. See r/mewing and r/orthotropics
Crooked or not, they still work just fine. If they become an impediment to reproduction/attractiveness, or somehow lead to more deaths before reproduction is possible, they’ll eventually go the way of the dodo bird. Since that hasn’t been the case, or the case to the extent that it’s obvious, they still appear regularly.
There are genetic factors to this, but a lot of it is caused by outside factors. A big one is the introduction of pacifiers and feeding bottles for babies. They chew on this hard plastic, and it pushes their teeth out of alignment. It’s the same effect retainers hsve on your teeth, only the other way. It’s worth noting that this mostly have an effect on the “overbite” phenomenon, where all or most of your upper front teeth get pushed forward.
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Hello, I am a dentist. All the answers are wrong.
It is not related to diet change because evolutionary processes cannot be so rapid. The answer is much simpler. Tooth alignment is present if the size of the teeth is appropriate for the size of the jaws. If the teeth are too large relative to the jaws, they will crowd together. Tooth and jaw size are genetically determined. The population was once composed of communities with the same gene pool, and having straight teeth is an evolutionary advantage. When humans began to colonize new territories the gene pools became mixed, and offspring of parents from different backgrounds could inherit jaw size from one parent and tooth size from the other parent. This causes misalignment of teeth.
To prove this just look at small communities in remote places, they still have straight teeth.
Western diet is a huge issue. How wide a palate is plays a huge role, which if someone were bottle fed without an “orthodontic” nipple or not breast fed they may end up with a narrow palate. When there is no room the teeth still have to come in.
There’s infinite ways to be crooked, and only one way to be straight. It’s just a numbers game.
The responses here are wild!
My take: teeth have always been crooked to some extent or other for hundreds of thousands of years.
Civilization dates back a few thousand years.
Medical expertise to perform dental intervention for straight teeth only a few hundred years.
Our animal bodies were built for a much older foundation: one of previous 100 thousand years where the requirements were to reach age and reproduce. Our diets were rougher back then.
I think there are a lot of other good ideas in the comments. Ultimately, since is bio, I’d say it’s a comfortable synergy of a bunch.
Modern human jaws don’t have enough room for our teeth, because infant breast feeding and chewing tough food have been largely minimized for modern children in developed countries. It’s not genetic, at least not entirely, but rather a change in the way modern humans eat, and how we feed our children. Breast feeding and tough food encourage better alignment and more robust development of the jaw as we grow.
Studies have shown that breast feeding or lack thereof is a massive predictor of tooth/jaw alignment problems. Infants that are more exclusively breast fed for longer periods of time are way less likely to develop misalignment.
Evolution only works if the problem stops breeding. Crooked teeth still allows you to live and breed. Same for most problems, it doesn’t stop baby making.
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