Your cavemen ancestors actually had wide jaws with roomy, aligned teeth and arches that any dentist or your ARCH orthodontist in Greater Boston and Cape Cod would love to treat. It seems that as time moved on, our jaws and bite changed too.
Ancient Chompers Were Healthier Than Ours : Shots - Health News By examining ancient dental plaque, researchers have found that prehistoric diets made for healthier mouths. The addition of flour and sugar to modern diets may have set the stage for oral disease.
But what did humans do to fix their teeth before modern dentistry, before Novocain, gauze, and rubber spacers? As it turns out, our ancestors did not suffer from crooked teeth to the same extent that we do today.
Our mouths got smaller to adjust to the new portion sizes, but our teeth didn't keep pace. Some experts say that's one of the major causes for today's crooked teeth. We have the same size teeth as our Neanderthal ancestors did, but smaller jaws!
Fossil records suggest that ancient humans usually had straight teeth and wisdom teeth. Today, between 25-50 percent of people require some kind of orthodontic intervention.
Your cavemen ancestors actually had wide jaws with roomy, aligned teeth and arches that any dentist or your ARCH orthodontist in Greater Boston and Cape Cod would love to treat. It seems that as time moved on, our jaws and bite changed too.
The museum's team of bone and tooth experts use super-powered imaging scanners and an electron microscope that can show a sliver of hard tissue at 40,000 times its actual size. Monge pinpoints the emergence of crooked smiles to perhaps 150, 200 years ago.
Surprisingly, analysis of skeletons from the middle ages suggest that people actually had quite healthy teeth! They used rough linen cloths to clean their teeth, often accompanied with a variety of pastes and powders used to whiten teeth and preserve fresh breath.
Cavemen chewed on sticks to clean their teeth and even used grass stalks to pick in between their teeth. Without the availability of high-quality toothbrushes and toothpaste, however, cavemen's teeth were more susceptible to cavities and decay, even with a healthy, carbohydrate-free diet.
But over time, our teeth have grown crooked because our jaws have grown smaller. It all emanates from cultural shifts within important daily actions we seldom think about — chewing, breathing, or the position of our jaws at rest. And industrialization changed everything.
Those changes likely came from diet, as previous studies have suggested. Hunter-gatherers needed big, strong jaws to chew the uncooked vegetables and meat that often made up their menu.
As they began pursuit hunting, they breathed through their mouths while they ran long distances. It is believed that over time, repeated mouth breathing led to human faces—including jaws—becoming smaller in order to help stabilize the head.
Our ancestors' diets made oral hygiene mostly unnecessary, but the types of food we eat today make brushing, flossing, and routine dental visits essential.
Ancient Diets Versus Modern Diets
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, people ate natural foods such as wheat and rice, fruits and vegetables. Without today's chemicals and processing, these foods contained nutrients that helped keep teeth and gums healthy.
When it comes to the best overall dental health, Denmark takes the #1 spot. With a DMFT (decayed, missing, or filled teeth) index score of 0.4, Danish citizens have pretty perfect teeth. Germany, Finland, Sweden, and the UK all have scores below 1.0, making them the five countries with the healthiest teeth.
A low-sugar diet, rich in fruit and vegetables — along with fluorine that was present in a local water source— gave them their pearly whites. (The Mediterranean diet scores again!) The only dental damage was apparently due to the people's habits of "cutting or snapping objects with their jaws," ANSA adds.
Fibrous Food
The ancient peoples' diet consisted a large part of fibrous foods. Fibrous foods are great for digestion, but also help to keep our teeth healthy and clean. They do this by aiding in flushing away food debris from the surface of the teeth.
The Stone Age. Back in Paleolithic times (also known as the stone age), cleanliness was not considered important. There were no baths, no showers, and no soaps or scents. Or, to put it another way, if you go back a few thousand years, your ancestors were really, really smelly.
Frank Medina, otherwise known as the "King of Windmills," has never had a cavity in his life. That would not be so unusual, except that he is 94 years old. Ripley's Believe it or Not calls him the “oldest man in the world with all his teeth who has never had a cavity."
Wealthy Brits did not hesitate to indulge their sweet tooth, and it was no different for the monarch, Queen Elizabeth I. The queen was especially fond of sweets, but not so fond of the dentist. Her teeth rotted; they turned black and gave off a foul odor.
Handwashing was a wide spread occurence int he middle ages. people would wash their hands and faces upon rising, before meals, at the end of the day, or arriving at a house after a long journey. The idea that medieval people were continually grubby and had poor hygiene is a myth.
People have lived for millennia without the freshest of breath, and it has even been discovered that early people tried to fix this problem. In fact, it's a topic the Smithsonian has written several articles on, detailing the different ways that ancient peoples tried to freshen up.
Our prehistoric ancestors had some of the same natural tooth protection we no longer have with today's modern diets. Another reason animals don't need the same oral care we do is because they have much shorter lives; chances are good their teeth will outlast the body's longevity.
Modern braces were invented in 1819 by Christophe-Francois Delabarre. The French had evolved the field of dentistry in the 1700s, with notable advances including custom mouthguards and removing wisdom teeth to manage to overcrowd. However, it was Delabarre who created the precursor to braces as we know them today.
Genes play a part
People who have lovely, straight, well-shaped teeth often have parents with lovely, straight, well-shaped teeth, funnily enough. Teeth, like other parts of your body, can be a combination of your genes. And, like other genetic body things, they don't have to be directly from your parents, either.