A young lady was laying down and was in pains and when I inquired what was wrong, I was told she was having tooth issues. She is in her early twenties so I wonder what could be wrong. At first I thought it was tooth decay but then her mom said it was she developing wisdom tooth. I felt pity for her as she was experiencing pain but most especially I was feeling for her in case she might have to pull it out because majority of wisdom tooth get pulled out because they will become a menace in the mouth.
Known as Wisdom teeth in English because they show up when we are getting wiser as adults, but some countries call it other names like huddling teeth in Thai because they huddle for space since there isn't space for them to develop, and in Spanish, they are known as the judgement teeth because at this point, a person is able to judge between good and bad. As we transition into adulthood, we first develop our premolars which we use for grinding as we grow, then we develop two molars behind each side of the teeth with us having four molars on each corner of the mouth. As we grow older, we then develop a third molar on the sides of the mouth known as the wisdom teeth.
Due to the lack of space for this teeth to come out, they are often very painful when coming out and they can cause a lot of dental problems. When they are growing, their lack of space makes them come out crooked and not fully out of the gum which can lead to swelling in the gum, affect the placement of other teeth in the mouth and often lead to teeth decay.
The tooth wait for when the jaw is fully matured before they come out but they do not often come out come complete or do not come out at all. It is a set of teeth that we can do without but why do they still come out when they are not that important in our dental structure. Just like so many structure we inherited from our ancestors that are not that important, so is wisdom teeth. Our Ape related ancestors and our close cousins like Chimpanzees and Gorillas have wisdom teeth but the teeth was not a problem for them because they have bigger mouth and bigger jaws compared to us.
This began to change with homo erectus as the brain structure started to change to house our expanding brains which led to smaller jaws. Also, science suspects that our change in diet type is responsible for the change in our jaw structure. We see that people who live in developed countries were they always have food cooked and readily available tend to have wisdom tooth problem because the jaws has been designed not to need wider jaw or need an extra molar tooth but this is not the same in regions where they are hunter-gatherers as they do not often have problems with wisdom teeth. Research has shown that impacted wisdom teeth is about 10 time common in developed and industrial areas than in areas where its habitats are hunter-gatherers.
Researchers have seen the the size and type of teeth of species develop is associated to the type of diet they consume but the size of the molars have to do ancestry and how big the specie is. Scientists have mentioned genetics as being the determinant of wisdom teeth development in humans but genetics is not only involved as research has shown that environment can also play a significant role. This result was gotten from the study of twins who lived in different region.
Although I mentioned a few things, there are still a lot of things to learn about wisdom teeth as to why they are there and why they still cause dental impacts. Do you think there is a possibility that evolution will let go off wisdom over time since it has become something that we do not use or even create space for.
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Reference
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279591/
https://theconversation.com/bad-molars-the-origins-of-wisdom-teeth-104835
https://wjarr.com/sites/default/files/WJARR-2024-3650.pdf
https://peerj.com/articles/2242/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4317606/
https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/excellence-day/2019/events/53/
https://europepmc.org/article/med/27448555
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022034515581644?
https://typeset.io/pdf/the-functional-significance-of-dental-and-mandibular-82ouyv4qdn.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8827505/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8494445/