The Week, December 9, 2011
Mankind's embrace of agriculture may be the reason so many of us have poorly aligned teeth. Anthropologist Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel, at the U.K.'s University of Kent, analyzed human skulls from 11 cultures around the world. Those that belonged to farm-fed societies, she found, had short jaws filled with crowded, overlapping teeth, whereas members of groups that hunted and foraged had longer roomier mandibles. The difference, she says, is diet, not genetics. "Presumably, the children growing up in these different situations have different chewing behavior," Van Cramon-Taubadel tells DiscoveryNews.com. People living in agricultural societies are more likely to eat starchy, cooked meals of rice, corn, and bread that require only light chewing -- and previous studies have shown that jawbones grow shorter when they lack exercise. Hunter-gatherers are more likely to consume a chewier diet of wild game, nuts, and raw vegetables, and thus give their jaws more of a workout every day. "Our behavior can have such a dramatic effect on our biology," Von Cramon-Taubadel says. Children who chew tougher foods, she says, tend to have straighter teeth when they grow up.
