Unlike most animals, human diets have undergone a relatively rapid change in a relatively short period of time. Take an animal species and you’re looking a creature that’s been eating the same general diet for the last…million years or so.
Take humans, however, and our diets have changed drastically in the past…tens of thousand years, which in evolutionary terms is break-neck speeds. We’ve gone from diets heavy in fibrous plant materials, which are tough and require a lot of chewing to fully utilize, to being able to eat an entire meal through a straw. Basically our early, early, early ancestors had to chew on really tough, hard foods. These required large jaws with lots of teeth in order to get more energy out of.
As our diets got softer, our ancestors could get away with smaller jaws - which required less energy to grow and use. Using less energy while still acquiring the same amount in your diet as your large-jawed brethren = advantage.
So our species have evolved much smaller jaws in a very short order of time…and basically these problems are issues left for us to deal with thanks to this rapid evolution of cramming a lot teeth into a smaller space. Were it not for dental medicine, for example, people born without (or fewer) wisdom teeth might have an evolutionary advantage and wisdom teeth could’ve been weeded out over a few thousands years. I, for example, only had three wisdom. If that had given me an advantage, then my children would likely have had only three and so on and so forth.
0 comments:
Post a Comment