Just for fun, below is a picture of real cavemen teeth. These were found in Spain before agriculture hit the scene. Check out this link for a story on how these chompers lead to the oldest DNA found.
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| cbsnews.com |
Just look at those teeth! Pretty impressive pearly whites if you ask me. So why did I find this story so interesting? Well, for starters, I am all about the cavemen. Although they are not what I specialize in, they sure are fun to read about! Secondly, and please stop me if my arrogance gets a little big here, but ummm....I thought that we knew this already?
The teeth of humans were pretty well cared for under a natural diet. Granted some diets were better than others. For instance, vegetarian diets, like those seen by California Natives, tended to have higher tooth issues than the meat eating tribes did, here in North America. (Read article here). But this was true all over the world. Based on evidence found in the archaeological record, scientist can safely say, (and have been for many years now) that the real dental issues such as tooth decay and cavities didn't appear until the advent of agriculture. When we began to mess with our food, without understanding what we were doing, we introduced a lot of things into our diet that had negative effects on many different parts of our body. Most notably was our teeth.
One of my favorite things that I learned about was the relationship between corn and cavities. There was no evidence of cavities in Midwest Native American's until corn was introduced into the diet. Why was this? Because corn has a natural sugar in it that causes the teeth to break down and decay when not properly cleaned. Ever heard of High Fructose Corn Syrup? That comes from corn. It is a straight sugary syrup that is over used and abused in our current food system. What I like best about corn is the fact that it is the perfect example of us messing with our food and getting a negative out of a positive. The picture below comes from this article. The author here explains it way better than I do so take a look.
You see that ity-bity little thing on the left? That is what we call Teosinte. I actually saw a vile of this in one of my classes and trust me, the stuff is SMALL! About the height of the cap of a pen and much much thinner. Believe it or not, this is what corn came from. They messed with it until it produced a fruit that was big enough to feed a lot of people.
Why did they do this? Well, there are a ton of theories about why we went from hunter gathers to sedentary societies. Its so much information that I could go on for ever. The basics are that groups ended up getting too big to support their selves just with hunting and gathering. They had to find ways to provide enough food for everyone. This lead to becoming sedentary and the beginnings of agriculture. There is also some talk that it helped prevent wars over conflicting territory and so on but that's a post for another day. Basically, agriculture became a necessity in order to survive, but it brought with it some major down falls. Including poor dental health.
This is not to say that there were no dental issues before the advent of agriculture. There were. As a matter of fact it is believed that the Turkana Boy (read more here) died from an abscessed tooth. The issue at hand is that overall, human teeth were far healthier before agriculture came onto the scene and before we began the slow process of messing with our food. That's why I found the article and study to be a little surprising. I thought this was information that we already knew. Perhaps though, what I was taught was just speculation and this was scientist looking to verify what was already believed. Either way, it was a great read and an even greater chance to brush up on my caveman knowledge. I hope you all enjoyed it too! If you haven't read it, please do. You wont be disappointed.
Rachel B.
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