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Why didn't our ancient ancestors get cavities?
- lettergram 4y ago> We have very few teeth from this period in Africa. We don’t know if this is unusual or not, Alternative view, cavities were common and the teeth were removed / fell out.
- axlee 4y agoThe question should be "where are the missing teeth?, and why?
- djbusby 4y agoWouldn't they be scattered? Pluck rotten tooth, toss...years later die and leave a big collection of bones, while the little tooth just erodes away?
- nine_k 4y agoBadly damaged teeth also tend to splinter and crack, leaving little from the original shape to recognize. The question is, where are the half-decayed teeth that must statistically be present in skulls, because people die of unpredictable circumstances?
- bryanrasmussen 4y agowhat is the statistical chance that half decayed teeth will be present in the population that dies unexpectedly and what is the chance that someone who died unexpectedly will have their fossilized remains dug up later?
- labster 4y agoTooth Fairy has them, obviously.
- mostertoaster 4y agoBack in those days she practically got them for free! It’s why she’s been able to keep her rates so low today, she has a huge backfill from our ancient ancestors’ teeth.
- mysterydip 4y agoThe epitome of survivorship bias
- gumby 4y agoDo modern skulls lose their teeth too? Do we find them in a little pile under the skull?
- b20000 4y agothey didn't eat mickey D and other crap. no high fructose corn syrup. no sodas.
- yuppie_scum 4y agoThey didn’t eat Cadbury cream eggs and drink extra large sodas.
- jrs235 4y agoDo you have evidence or proof of this? /s
- yonaguska 4y agoOnly anecdotal
- gibolt 4y agoCadbury, since 1824. Although it may have just been acquired or rebranded at that time.
- 0des 4y agoPretty sure my caveman ancestors cobbled together the first Jolly Ranchers, otherwise why would I think they're so delicious?
- flossmaster 4y agoJust thinking about Jolly Ranchers makes me want to floss my teeth.
- otherotherchris 4y agoSince the mid 90's I've been having trouble keeping up with which soft drink conglomerate or highly leveraged hedge fund owns Cadbury in any given week, and whether it's one of the bad ones that I'm supposed to be boycotting. Wikipedia says it was Mondelez International this morning, but who knows if that information became out of date while I was typing it...
- Adraghast 4y agoTrue but irrelevant. Cavities begin showing up in the historical record several millennia before the advent of candy and soda.
- stuckkeys 4y agoIs this a rhetorical question?
- mc32 4y agoSo apparently some think cavities (caries) are contagious via mouth fluid exchange in kissing... if so, then perhaps an ancestor became an unwitting host through some unknown mechanics. Perhaps poorly cooked jowls of some sort.
- otherotherchris 4y agoCould have been hand to mouth contact from any number of sources. Bacterial biofilms are pretty easy to transfer and as we recently learned from eating bats it only has to happen once.
- b112 4y agoPeople will, even today, grab fruit off of trees, wipe it on their shirt, and eat it. Same goes for eating berries, which are much closer to the ground. Go back in time a bit, imagine 20k years ago, someone pulling a carrot, wiping it off, and eating it. Or even washing the dirt off, but unless cooked, or soap is used (a relatively new discovery), or a knife to remove the outside? A little water isn't going to destroy all bacteria on a carrot. Even today, I'll pick carrots, throw them in sink, wash them a bit and peel. Then eat raw. Bacteria is everywhere, and we're eating the same thing bateria eats, eg that sugary carrot plant... And... * milk * honey (literally bee spit sorta) * cheese (pig stomach juices thrown in with milk for a few days) By no means do we isolated ourselves baterialogically.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoYou have a source for that? It's my understanding that it is -very- hard to change another human's oral biome, the bacteria that are currently there have a huge advantage of out surviving foreign bacteria.
- toddm 4y ago
- melissalobos 4y ago> they had a life expectancy of like 20 years This just meant that a LOT of kids died, not that most adults didn't live very long.
- toomanydoubts 4y agoThat is something apparently so obvious, but I was pretty surprised when I first read it. Honestly grew up thinking everyone died at 30 in the past.
- melissalobos 4y agoI think that is part of the issue with communicating bulk statistics like life expectancy. In reality the median or mean after 15 or after 30 is likely more useful as a measure.
- throwaway892238 4y agoThe other weird thing is how skewed it was by sex. Men might have a life expectancy of 50 while for women it was 30.
- aaronbrethorst 4y agoDeath during childbirth.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoObviously child birth was risky but so was being a man running around hunting and fighting other men, I bet the chances were about the same. Neither of us have any sources though I'm willing to bet.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoYeah same, but if you made it to 18 your chances of making it to 50 or 60 were pretty good compared when you just popped outta ya mother.
- 0des 4y agoWhen your diet is mostly meat based, and some foraged greens and rare fruit, it is not the ideal environment to feed the process that creates cavities. Also, I'd imagine tooth extraction predates a lot of modern history, which may skew results, but that is just a guess on my part.
- mostertoaster 4y agoI figured it’s that they ate all the animal. They always boiled the bones and that strengthened their teeth. I bet if you look at ancient people in tropical areas they had less teeth as well as less need for them.
- agumonkey 4y agoInteresting, I would assume that prehistoric times required "perfect" teeth (and even overall geometry and jaw structure). You need a high quality grinding / cutting tool to rip meat easily.
- mostertoaster 4y ago
- dotancohen 4y agoThis is absolute fiction presented as facts. If HN had a way to killfile a user this user would be first on my list. This type of misinformation has no place on HN.
- FactoryReboot 4y agoThat’s easy. Sugar.
- wyager 4y agoIt's not just sugar - any carbohydrate which a bacterium can easily metabolize to sugar (i.e. most of them) is a hazard. Grains, tubers, etc. are all dangerous from a dental perspective and have only been consumed in calorically significant quantities after the advent of agriculture.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoYou're correct that any carbs can help form plaque, but humans have been getting significant numbers of calories from them since before we were H. sapiens.
- wyager 4y agoThis is only plausible for humans in tropical areas. It does not stand to reason for humans north of (conservatively), say, 40º. Even in humans in areas with calorically significant quantities of carbohydrates available, fossil records suggest they probably preferentially ate ruminants, same as anyone else.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoMost of human evolution occurred below 40N, so even if that point were correct, it would at best be limited to the adaptive behaviors of a very small group of human ancestors. However, there's plenty of evidence suggesting that there wasn't any such regionally adaptive behavior. The original find that suggested starchy plant consumption in H. erectus was analysis of the Dmanisi fossils at ~41N. Later work tying these sorts of results to typical European Neanderthal diets has been done for North Sea sites (~50N). Of course, Neanderthals never went much farther north than that due to the climate. As for AMHs, I've seen papers of sites near Smolensk (~55N) indicating moderate to heavy starchy plant use. That's not far from the glaciation line. Moreover, there are fairly convincing arguments that a nearly pure-meat diet doesn't work in winter due to the general lack of fat (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.11.016 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.11.016 ). There are caveats and workarounds here, but this whole idea that high-latitude hominins had limited, homogeneous diets is on increasingly shaky ground.
- hitovst 4y agoPerhaps due to only drinking water, and consuming the proper diet, in the region in which they were adapted.
- transfire 4y agoLike to add to this conversation that scientists have found ways to prevent cavities but these are not made available to us. For example, genetically modified streptococcus.
- contingencies 4y agoCool. Got a link on that?
- prettyStandard 4y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/?q=genetically+modified+streptococcus+cavities&t=brave https://duckduckgo.com/?q=genetically+modified+streptococcus...
- kingcharles 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caries_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caries_vaccine
- contingencies 4y agoDoesn't seem to say there's a functional human trial. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9040302B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9040302B2/en suggests patent expires 2031.
- twofornone 4y agoNovamin is not available for sale in the US (though you can get it off ebay) and supposedly it is a toothpaste additive which can directly deposit onto teeth.
- CaptainNegative 4y agoYou can get products with the similar bioactive glass ingredient BioMin [1], though for whatever reason the version that also includes fluoride is not yet sold in the US. [1] e.g. https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/dr.-collins-biomin-toothpaste-mint/ID=prod6399247-product https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/dr.-collins-biomin-toothpa...
- 29athrowaway 4y agoAlcohol.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sabujp 4y agoMy grandmother chewed betel leaves with a small amount of tobacco, betel nuts, lime (calcium hydroxide aka chuna/chun), multiple times a day all her life. Her other diet consisted of tea just as many times per day, and for actual food a diet of rice, fish, and vegetables. For the majority of her life I don't think she actually had access to fluoridated toothpaste and probably used neem twigs or even charcoal at times to brush her teeth. Her teeth were gross, tinted red and brown. She lived to 93 and I never heard of her ever getting cavities or fillings or going to a dentist. In the place where she lived the only reason you go to a "dentist" is to have teeth removed. Basically what I'm saying is that diet and genetics are a huge factor.
- riku_iki 4y agoSo, she still had all her teeth at 93? It is obvious that if she didn't visit dentists regularly, no one detected cavities, and teeth are just need to be pulled because of abscess from bacteria at the end.
- sabujp 4y agoyes she had all her teeth when she died
- riku_iki 4y agoOh, this is super interesting.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoMy grandma had all her teeth at 97 or so when she passed, and never saw a dentist, and I saw her use this tobacco toothpaste 3x per day for 25 years, until she died. https://image.slidesharecdn.com/stfactsheetcombined10-23-02-150319233902-conversion-gate01/95/stfact-sheet-combined102302-20-638.jpg?cb=1426808459 https://image.slidesharecdn.com/stfactsheetcombined10-23-02-... I assume she had a combination of good genes, frequent teeth cleaning right after meals, low sugar intake, and no soda/alcohol. I have never had a cavity as of mid 30s, and I only started going to dentist at 23 or so. I don’t eat much, if any, sweets/junk food/soda.
- jjeaff 4y agoAlthough this wouldn't apply to ancient humans, I have heard the hypothesis that many people in olden times didn't have as many problems with cavities because many people drank well water. And well water has naturally occurring fluoride.
- olah_1 4y agoAccording to this, naturally occuring fluoride in well water is around 0.05ppm and tap water that has been treated can have 0.7 or more. Quite a big difference. Probably enough to be worth looking into. https://fluoridealert.org/content/fresh_foods/ https://fluoridealert.org/content/fresh_foods/
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoThere's strong evidence. Fluoridation as public health policy modernly was partly driven by evidence from Colorado Springs, where naturally higher than typical fluoride levels caused better than average dental outcomes. To respond to a sibling comment: the relative levels have been looked at, in detail, and existing policy reflects what we've learned from that. Scaremongering over it influences real negative health outcomes, particularly amongst those with the most limited access to comprehensive dental care. Flouridation ain't quite as big as say sanitation, or antibiotics, but it's still up there on the list of biggest public health wins ever. By all means investigate it critically, but perhaps in a way more sophisticated than "have they looked at it in more depth than me spending 10 seconds googling?" imo.
- philliphaydon 4y agoIsn’t the natural occurring fluoride Calcium fluoride while what we put in tooth paste (and add to water) is sodium fluoride which in addition to helping with our teeth is technically poisonous in large doses which is why we spit out tooth paste and don’t give children fluoride tooth paste until they learn to spit?
- asdff 4y agoYou won't die or anything but you might get a stomach ache.
- WaxedChewbacca 4y ago
- artificialLimbs 4y ago1 drop clove oil, 1/2 cup water. Swish regularly. It's an antiseptic. 19 years ago I went to the dentist and he told me I needed to have a cavity filled. I skipped that. I didn't go back (or to any other dentist) until last year. Got the x-rays. No cavities. Stuff works. Oh and stop eating sugar.
- bamboozled 4y agoI eat tons of olive oil and drink water while doing so, I’ve had plenty of cavities, what do you think about that ?
- pseudostem 4y agoI mistook clove oil for olive oil too
- chrisoverzero 4y agoAntiseptic regrows enamel?
- antif 4y agoNo. Saliva regrows enamel.
- system2 4y ago"The Verdict: You can do a lot to protect and strengthen your tooth enamel, but once it has eroded, it’s gone, baby, gone!" Says webmd. https://www.webmd.com/oral-health/features/can-tooth-enamel-grow-back https://www.webmd.com/oral-health/features/can-tooth-enamel-...
- justbaker 4y agoWebmd is an awful reference
- mostertoaster 4y agoBecause back then bears ate beets. Then we got hooked on them and made beat sugar and now we eat beets. Bears still beat battle star galatica though.
- denimnerd42 4y agogenes probably. I’m mid 30s and have never had a cavity. I go to the dentist every 6months. I also have a huge sweet tooth.
- thematrixturtle 4y agoFWIW, dental health outcomes for visiting dentist yearly instead of every 6 months are apparently identical. Downvoters, have a link to an article discussing some studies: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140926-how-often-must-we-see-a-dentist https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140926-how-often-must-w...
- denimnerd42 4y agoI have a permanent retainer that builds up a little placque even with regular flossing so it’s nice to get that cleaned.
- donthellbanme 4y agoI haven't been to one in 25 years. I probally pushing my luck? Have all my teeth. Three cavities. My gums don't bleed when flossing. When brushing I concentrate on the gums. Use a Sonic toothbrush daily. Have a neurotic habit of using tooth picks. (I knew the dentist who developed the plastic tooth picks with floss. I couldn't stand family. Why? Because he was a rich dentist who set all his kids up for life, but couldn't pay his workers a decent wage. He did offer free dental though? His spoiled boy had a 50' racing racing sloop in high school. I am also jealous too.) I don't like food in my teeth. I usually have a tooth pick within reach at all times. I am not a fan of sweets though, but put a lot of sugar in my coffee. Teeth, and gums, are very much prone to the placebo effect. Every study dentists do require a control group, and placebo controls.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoIf you go to a dentist now they will likely find those cavities have gone deep. I recommend that you do.
- 4y ago
- lesgobrandon 4y ago
- bsder 4y agoThe fact that we have "wisdom teeth" seems to indicate that ancient humans did, in fact, get cavities and lose teeth to them.
- Noumenon72 4y agoI don't think an extra molar at age 16 is going to let you survive after all your other teeth have fallen out. I would guess the wisdom teeth are either waiting for your jaw to mature or are in the process of devolving to never erupt at all.
- devmor 4y agoThat's not really how evolution works. There's no reason that modern humans would ever lose wisdom teeth unless NOT having them led to some evident increase in ability to produce healthy children in abundance. With the advent of dental care, that seems unlikely to ever happen by evolution.
- Noumenon72 4y agoThe process of devolving to never erupt at all would have started long before modern dental care, driven by impaction complications or pressure to appear neotenous with a small jaw. I agree it won't continue.
- mateo1 4y agoAlso nobody mentions all the starchy stuff and the fruit our ancestors ate. It's just odd how people reinterpret the entire history of our species based on recent dietary fads.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- taurusnoises 4y agoWeston A Price is really the go-to for the early research in nutrition and dentistry. His book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration was making the rounds back when Nourishing Traditions became popular. Price, conclusively in my mind, showed that the moment the modern western was introduced into cultures who ate traditional foods, the next generation had terrible teeth, jaws that were too small for all their teeth, etc. Pretty great, if terrible findings, stuff. The typical western diet is a shit show, imo
- gregwebs 4y agoIt’s a 100 year old book that is still required reading if you want to understand the subject of the article because Price visited existing healthy cultures around the world that had few cavities. He concluded that the shift from a nutrient dense diet to a nutrient poor diet (white flour and sugar) was the cause of cavities.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> The typical western diet is a shit show, imo On the other hand, from The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han: > In the Eastern Han [roughly 25-220 AD] a celebration was held each autumn at the Old Man Star Shrine south of the capital. During this feast those who had reached the age of seventy were given imperial staffs and fed by hand with rice gruel (on the assumption that they had lost their teeth). The staff had a model of a dove perched on its top, because the dove was said to never choke Sometimes there's no real reason to believe things were different in the past.
- tomerv 4y agoThe cause for losing teeth is very different from cavities.
- ComradePhil 4y agoOne doesn't have to ditch all "western food". Just being sensible with it is good enough: - ditch plant fat for animal fat - avoid excessive sugar - eat real food (no fake milk, meat etc.) - stop eating vegetables, specially raw vegetables Food is one of those things I take an ultra conservative stance on. The food industry has made eating literal poison (plant seeds, plant oils, spinach, brussel sprouts etc.) seem healthy with corrupt research and marketing. You can't just take a food ingredient from one culture, throw away the indegenous preparation techniques and eat it completely different way and expect it to work. Take spinach for example. It comes from ancient Persia where it was added to a meat stew... you can't eat that raw. Spinach has high oxalate content... which gets reduced when you cook it for a long time. The remaining oxalate binds with high calcium in the meat stew and the resulting dish has no oxalate content at all. Oxalates are one of the anti-nutrients, which are phytotoxins that plants use to avoid being eaten... Anti-nutrients in particular attack animals by affecting essential nutrient absorption. Indegenous preparation, which has evolved with the cultures, has ways to manage these toxins or counter them with some other ingredient which makes it edible. You can't do away with those preparation techniques.
- nabilhat 4y agoBetteridge's law applies. It's well understood that hominids experienced tooth decay throughout their evolution. Causes and contributors and rates over time may be up for debate, but the evidentially confirmed fact that our ancestors got cavities is settled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_decay#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_decay#History
- stjohnswarts 4y agoIt's also well understood that our sugar intake is probably 10x what it was before sugar was cheap and readily available and our cavity rate (at least if you aren't brushing) has increased proportionally. I don't think anyone really believes that cavemen never had cavities, just that it was much less common.
- rdiddly 4y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Nutrition-Physical-Degeneration-Weston-Price/dp/0916764206 https://www.amazon.com/Nutrition-Physical-Degeneration-Westo...
- orionblastar 4y agoCalcium helps make strong bones and teeth. So milk drinkers had good teeth. Norway is northern Europe where they have the gene to digest milk.
- riffraff 4y agoIsn't the gene you're talking about related to lactose? You can still get calcium from milk, or make cheese which will naturally be lactose free.
- ck2 4y agothere are endless stories of ancient civilizations and palaeolithic humans dying young from dental abscess, 10 seconds on google defeats this weird spin
- asdff 4y agoBecause brushing/flossing/scraping the teeth with a stick is a learned behavior that even today isn't fully learned by our species.
- nlitened 4y agoI wonder if human-like apes brush or floss? Do they drink naturally-occurring fluorinated water from wells? And I’d love to have some insights on their cavities and pulled teeth statistics.
- asdff 4y agoThey do at least floss: https://www.science.org/content/article/monkeys-may-have-better-dental-hygiene-you https://www.science.org/content/article/monkeys-may-have-bet...
- mostertoaster 4y agoOur ancestors ate less sugar, especially as children. Next question.
- kennethh 4y agoThe Vipeholm experiments were a series of human experiments where patients of Vipeholm Hospital for the intellectually disabled in Lund, Sweden, were fed large amounts of sweets to provoke dental caries (1945–1955). The experiments were sponsored both by the sugar industry and the dentist community, in an effort to determine whether carbohydrates affected the formation of cavities. Main building of Vipeholm hospital, now a secondary school The experiments provided extensive knowledge about dental health and resulted in enough empirical data to link the intake of sugar to dental caries.[1] However, today they are considered to have violated the principles of medical ethics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipeholm_experiments#:~:text=The%20Vipeholm%20experiments%20were%20a,caries%20(1945%E2%80%931955) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipeholm_experiments#:~:text....
- jazzabeanie 4y agoThat’s how ethics goes. It’s fine to give someone something if you don’t know what it’s going to do. Makes it kinda difficult to disprove/ confirm a common belief that something is bad for your health.
- leobg 4y agoRelated observations: 1) Ötzi had cavities and gum disease. “Ötzi, a Stone Age man who died atop a glacier about 5300 years ago, suffered from severe gum disease and cavities.” [1] 2) Sailor Steven Callahan, after 72 days adrift in the Atlantic ocean, where he subsisted on fish and birds, after being rescued: "When I wake up in the morning, I look into the mirror. My God! Who's that? The face I see is straight out of Robinson Crusoe. Long, stringy bleached hair, hollow eyes, drawn brown skin, shaggy beard. Michelle Monternot gives me a toothbrush. It feels strange in my mouth. What's even stranger is that my teeth are not crusty and slimy but are remarkably clean. I wonder what my dentist would say about that." [2] [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-iceman-had-bad-teeth#:~:text=%C3%96tzi%20(inset%20photo)%2C%20a,for%20gripping%20tools%20and%20cutting https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-iceman-h.... [2] https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&hl=en&id=ebUKAQAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Dentist https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&hl=en&id=ebUKAQAA...
- mejutoco 4y agoIn Man in search of meaning Viktor Frankl mentions in passing how his gums and teeth are healthier than ever, although he mostly ate minimum amounts of bread.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoMy personal experience from dabbling in low-carb diets is that dental plaque goes away almost completely in a relatively short amount of time. Admittedly such a diet shift does a lot to upset your microbes, what once flourished with abundant carbohydrates is suddenly starving and maladapted. May be that eventually something else would come along that is better optimized to the new environment.
- washadjeffmad 4y agoYours was the first sensible comment I came across. While it's true the availability of fermentable carbohydrates in modern diets has contributed to the prevalence of dental caries, etc, it is mostly collective cultural amnesia to believe our ancestors had perfect teeth. The concept of "tooth worms" existed for thousands of years prior to the advent of medical science. I'm on mobile, but I also recall reading about ancient remains (possibly pre-humans) with drilled cavities, woven metal bracings, and many other types of dental protheses.
- jrootabega 4y agoThis made me think of the Popular But Possibly Factoidal Article (TM) that goes around every now and then about fighter plane armor. Militaries tried reinforcing the parts of the planes that were damaged after missions. But it didn't help survival rates much. Then Smart Man asked what would happen if they reinforced only the parts of the planes that were NOT damaged, hypothesizing that the planes that didn't make it were being damaged there. And it worked, according to Popular Article! So the fact that we don't find too many fossils with tooth decay means that it could have been a huge problem. And this is the origin of the joke: you don't have to brush all your teeth, just the ones you find on early hominid fossils.
- spixy 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_the_military https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_the_milit...
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoCalorie density? Teeth may have been 'designed' for low-caloric-density foods. The art of civilization is increasing that density, so we have time to do other things (civilized things)