Your Teeth Are Crooked. Blame Modern Life.
Why did ancient humans have straighter teeth than you?
It’s a common rite of American adolescence. Kids lose their baby teeth, their adult teeth come in crooked or crowded, and their parents take them off to the orthodontist for several years of painful and expensive restructuring. The parents pay, the kids suffer, and then the braces come off after a couple of years. For many people, this isn’t the end of the story — for some, the perfect smile that the orthodontist constructed when we were 12 degrades over time, and by middle age, we have crooked teeth again.
Now, think about this — have you ever encountered an animal in need of orthodontia? The answer is probably no. In fact, scholars have found that crooked teeth are very rare even among humans until quite recently in history. Though early humans lived a hard life and their bones show all kinds of health problems, their teeth are generally much straighter than ours.
So why do modern humans have so many problems with crooked teeth while ancient humans had straight smiles? The main reason is that we don’t chew enough. Before the invention of agriculture, human…
