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Alicorn comments on Constructing fictional eugenics (LW edition) - Less Wrong Discussion
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In primitive societies, few people spend most of their lives having teeth.
My understanding was that pre-contact or historical primitive societies had fairly decent dental health, with low tooth decay - such problems being more of a sugar-heavy modern society issue.
I am not an expert, but isn't the entire reason we have two sets of teeth that we could be reasonably expected to lose much of the first set anyway by the time the others appeared? By what mechanism would the second set last significantly longer?
Gwern is correct here -- paleolithic populations tended to have excellent dental health if skeletal evidence is anything to judge by, and the case of modern forager groups is often determined mainly by the degree to which they now consume high glycemic-index commodities. Chukchi and Eveny groups in Russia have appalling dental health statistics due to poor nutrition and lots of refined sugar (to the point that one Eveny nickname for sugar is "the white death" -- they have really high rates of diabetes too). Khoisan folks in South Africa, on the other hand, tend to have excellent teeth when they eat something like their traditional diet.
I've always thought the reason we have milk teeth is that there's just no room for adult teeth in a small child's jaw.
That's plausible, but what about wisdom teeth? They appear when the jaw is already full-sized; I have heard that they wouldn't historically be a problem because you'd have lost teeth and there would be room for them.
Oh, I hadn't thought of that. I've been taught that they're vestigial, and that our ancestors had bigger jaws. But they can in fact grow into the space left by an extracted tooth. It happened to me, a few decades ago. I had a bad back molar, and instead of making a crown or something, the dentist pulled it, saying the wisdom tooth behind it would replace it. And it did!