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Ancient Teeth Bacteria Record Disease Evolution
An anonymous reader writes "DNA preserved in calcified bacteria on the teeth of ancient human skeletons has shed light on the health consequences of the evolving diet and behavior from the Stone Age to the modern day. The ancient genetic record reveals the negative changes in oral bacteria brought about by the dietary shifts as humans became farmers, and later with the introduction of food manufacturing in the Industrial Revolution."
We eat sugar and complex carbs more than most animals and these tend to cause tooth decay. When you're a wolf who only eats protein it isn't a problem.
It would be interesting to study dental health across humans with various diets i.e. vegetarians, vegans, etc.
What sibling post said about sugar, plus we stopped eating really coarse food. Eating hard roots will scrub bacterial plaque off your teeth. When we stopped eating as many raw, hard roots, we had to substitute that function with brushing, but it seems to be less efficient. Additionally, our jaws are far too short for the number for teeth we have, thus the problems of wisdom teeth, which also pushes the other teeth together, making the room between them harder to clean.
If you had a choice, would you kiss a cave woman (or man) with her/his supposedly lovely oral biodiversity, or a member of the Scope, Colgate, and Oral-B generation? I would bet a lot that, if someone had those oral inventions 7,500 years ago, he/she would have passed on a lot more DNA to future generations.
Plants and animals generally have a lifespan long enough to procreate - then they are a waste.
Human animals are pretty well designed to live to age 30 or 40, maybe 50, then they are a waste. Teeth, bones, whatever, are just not designed to last a whole lot longer. Women show this even more than men. They spend the first ten to fifteen years growing into sexual maturity, they spend the next twenty years or so reproducing, then they face the onset of osteoporosis and a multitude of hormonal problems. Nature simply didn't design us to live forever.
Specifically, on topic, not only do we live longer today, but we don't eat the way nature intended. We put sugar in everything, for starters. Corn syrup, mushy processed foods, foods without their natural enzymes, foods with little if any fiber, foods bleached of their primary nutritional content, foods with artificial junk in them, foods filled with useless and possibly detrimental colorings - the list goes on.
Want to beat the problems we have with our teeth? Get closer to nature. Eat your meats fresh and rare. Eat your veggies raw. Don't eat processed foods. Don't eat sugars and corn syrups. DON'T SLURP ON SWEETENED AND FLAVORED DRINKS ALL DAY LONG!! Those damned drinks are probably the single leading cause of dental problems. Drink your 6 to 12 cups of water throughout the day, and MAYBE have a single flavored drink with your meals, whether that be coffee, a soda, or whatever.
In short, we've outsmarted Mother Nature, we outlive our intended lifetimes, and we fail to care for our teeth properly. It's a wonder that we are keeping our teeth for as long as we do!
And, no, I really don't think that we are going to "evolve" better teeth. We will only keep what we have, for so long as we keep outsmarting Mother Nature. If we lose our edge with technology and modern medicine, then we are going to lose our current life spans, and we'll lose our teeth even sooner.
Now - do you want to compare oral problems with other animals? Read the story of the man eating lions, in the story of 'The Spirit and The Ghost'. As I recall, the elder lion had a broken canine, which was extremely painful. Because it hurt so damned bad to bite through the tough hides of almost any animal, he resorted to killing soft skinned people. Apparently, people aren't the tastiest game available to lions, but they are among the easiest to kill. One quick chomp on a leg, and they are down, ready to be killed and consumed at leisure. An entire region was terrorized for months because of a lion's dental problems. The younger lion? I think he just followed the elder lion's lead, or something like that. Maybe he was just lazy.
Animals have dental problems, but we generally don't hear them complaining about their teeth.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
...nice guess, but RTFA and learn a bit of actual dental hygiene. What you eat isn't the problem, it's what it attracts. With the exception of extremely acidic beverages, the food we eat does not directly damage our teeth. Getting lots of calcium is certainly important for preventing osteoporosis, in teeth and elsewhere, but that's the whole story. You can eat as much sugar as you want if you're in a completely sterile environment. It won't hurt you. (Not that such a place exists.)
Every exposed surface both inside and out of the human body is its own little bacterial world. The flora in the intestines have been in the news a lot lately because it's become apparent that some diabetes and obesity cases are tightly linked to disruptions in the compositions of these communities—the wrong bacteria get in and cause trouble.
The big discovery of the story is that the bacteria in the mouth used to be a lot more diverse. Just like the intestines of the obese, agriculture has put our mouths (with very few exceptions like the bushmen and uncontacted peoples) into bad shape. It's not natural for us to even need to brush our teeth—note no other animal doing this.
I also think you've misrepresented life expectancy a little by componentizing things... as well as being a tiny bit low numerically. The wealthy in ancient Greece averaged about 70 years, without anything resembling sanitation, and the average Roman commoner made it to 45. It's true that some components stop functioning earlier, but that doesn't mean Mother Nature would disapprove of us pushing past it. Many of the changes the occur in middle age can have positive outcomes on the social group by encouraging the individual to focus on other aspects of life, primarily looking after the family or tribe.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Link to the source, not some asshole plagiarising it to get ad hits.
I recently read a lot of stuff on fluoride, from both sides of the debate. Taking the admitted negatives from the pro side and the admitted positives from the anti side, and following links to actual articles when i could, my conclusions were:
1/ Small amounts of topical fluoride have a beneficial effect on teeth
2/ Large amounts of ingested fluoride weaken both your bones and teeth.
3/ Ingested fluoride accumulates in the body, mostly in the bones. 50% of what is ingested is never excreted.
4/ There is a slight correlation between water fluoridation and dental health.
5/ The possible benfits of water fluoridation are hard to quantiry because they are swamped by the effects of fluoride toothpaste
6/ There is at least as strong a correlation between water fluoridation and hip breakage in the elderly.
7/ Both sides are pushing an agenda, everything reads like propaganda unless you read the actual journal articles.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
Most mammals live for a billion (10^9) heartbeats, humans live about 60 years, twice as long. One theory is the Grandmother Effect. That is having older women share the burden of childrearing aided in the children's survival.