Cooking our Evolution - Wisdom teeth
:drill sound:.
-I want anesthesia, please.
Oh, don't worry, it's just a superficial cavity.
-Alright then...
:drill sound:.
-AAAAAAAHHH! (F*cking sh*thead why don't you go f*ck you mother!!!) AAAAAHHHHH!!!
By: (Any individual, always).
If we ran a research about the most hated professions, I'm sure that at the top 3 odontologists, fighting for the 1st place against politicians and politicians. And, they would not be in first place, because odontologists take problems away from us, so we are compassive.
These mouth speleologists explore looking for bacterial intruders camouflaged in our saliva; these dental drill artists dig deep into places that are not always in tip-top condition. Mouths that shelter alimentary corpses and carcasses for who-knows-sine-when in between teeth.
But what really amazes me about dentists is their huge capability to face evolution. Anesthesia, radiography, pliers and a bloody task of ripping away wisdom teeth.
Today, unlike decades ago, many people do not have! Let me explain
These dental pieces are 4, two at each side, above and below; placed at the end of the teeth and and are the last ones to appear at a teeth's lunch table, where everyone already took the available seats. When they show up, they start behaving as any unwanted visitor, like a nasty mother in law, they are stubborn, and the only thing they want to do is to "take a place" no matter what. It does not matter if this implies growing horizontally, pushing others, and converting "goddamit f*cking wise teeth" into the best academic description at the moment.
So, the necessary evil shows up, these devils and their demonic tools... We can land drones in an asteroid, force atoms to collide; yet, we still haven't invented a silencer for that frikking drill.
What are they for?
Back with evolution, wisdom teeth represent an evolutionary vestige, this means that they are part of our body that at a given moment had a function, but today, they don't. some may recall an example of evolutionary vestige by naming the Appendix, yet, rather recently: We've discovered that it still has the function of acting like a bacterial reservoir in case of serious diarrhea, like in the case of cholera; saving our digestive system.
By studying the shape of skulls and jaws of hominids, and by analyzing the texture of fossilized teeth, we know that wisdom teeth were very useful several millions of years ago when our ancestors had a high on vegetables diet, hard seeds, generic raw things. But, with today's average diet, they have nearly no other use than to make us shiver in pain. this is a hard evidence that if there was a designer for our human race... He did skip a few classes in "life-form design".
Understanding the history behind our teeth is also understanding our history as species. If we start with the Australopithecus, they had a small skull and large and prominent face. Their jaw was way larger than ours, they had no molar teeth issues, since there was plenty of space inside their mouths. This horde ate generic vegetation, roots, fruits... Sometimes meat, if they caught a small animal... As we may see in the following video.
At the other evolutive path, the Paranthropus used their enormous jaws even better, they were able to eat hard vegetation that appeared after a climate change. The major change happened when the "homo" appeared, including usual meat in the diet; around 2 million years ago, the process of the teeth's size reduction started, yet until the Homo Sapiens (us)all hominid species had a relatively large jaw and none of them needed an odontologist. Our species "break free" of the mold, since at some point our jaw became smaller, limiting the available space for these teeth that allowed us to chew hard meals.
The jaw and face size reduction in general appears to be an event that happened way after the inclusion of meat into the diet, it matches the start of the controlled use of fire. There is records of fire being used 1 million years ago, it wasn't until 250000 years ago that it was in a controlled way, around the same era where the Homo Sapiens appears; this aids us to see how much weight all these events had in our evolutive history. Handling fire translated into more soft food in our diets, reducing the stress it the masticatory system therefore, the need for it to be sturdy. Besides, it helped us predigesting the food outside our bodies, making it "lighter", and enhance the energy availability up to 40%. This is a very important point, if you posses a hungry thinking brain. So, cooking is not only a universal human behavior, it is also a biologic necessity. Cooking disables potential toxic substances (as in cyanide precursors) and lengthens the time we may store food without it rotting. So, cooking enhances the energetic efficiency in food, by increasing the availability of energy, saving the body some "work" of digesting, and using that surplus of energy in other more productive tasks, like... Thinking.
Many years later, seed manipulation by artificial selection made the veggies we grew larger, tastier and softer, translating into an level lighter stress in our digestive system; along with a lack of need of large jaws, evidenced in the size difference of the jaws of modern gatherer-hunter and agricultural human communities. So, we got a mega-pack of reasons to not need a large jaw...
Can we now evolve into a human with no wisdom teeth ?
There's already some that did. But, the problem is that evolution does not work that way, since having wisdom teeth does not kill you, and natural selection do not has a plan of "remove whatever we do not need". We rely on random mutations to discard this obsolete hardware. So, they stayed.
Even when we know how fire affected the enhancement of our brain. Visiting the dentist remind us the evolutive footprint many of us have to cope with.
Next, we need to get rid of the pinky toe.
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I consider myself lucky to have my wisdom teeth come in without any pain or the need for removal. Everybody else in my family had them removed except for me.
I do still have my top ones, they came in very handy after my other molars were KIA by cavities (they used to hurt so much, I had to pull them out myself in the middle of the night).