"they never thought of cavities as a disease because it's so normalized," --Kevin Stock, DDS. I wonder if the dental industry had anything to do with that?
There is no need for dentists in the Stone Age.
We have a hard time keeping our teeth for one lifetime today but teeth preserved for millions of years in the fossil record; they are 97% mineral. Often when we look at archeology and like you, I'm fascinated with dental archeology, the fossil record, we see some very interesting things. The most fossils we have are teeth of these skeletons, and so we learn a lot about our past through the teeth. Teeth tell us a lot about what we should or shouldn't be eating. It's often the canary in the coal mine. We put the wrong things in the mouth, and we see the problems first happen in the mouth. For example, we'll see gingivitis first, and then we'll see . . . , and by the time you have a heart attack then we finally see the same etiology ending up as a heart attack but a little bit late. Prior to the Agricultural Revolution, roughly 12,000 years ago, humans are homo sapiens . . . the dental record, like you said-- no cavities, no abscesses; if you had cavities, we could see that in the teeth abscesses. All 32 teeth fit in. The wisdom teeth, you know, we have 32 teeth, people may not realize that, but the wisdom teeth they were fitting in our mouths. There was plenty of room for them, whereas today, . . . mine got taken out when I was 13 years old. I didn't have room for them. So what's going on here? The root cause here is diet mostly. So 12,000 years ago, a big change that we see in the fossil record coincides with the Agricultural Revolution, the cultivation of crops, and the rise of a particular non-essential macronutrient starting to take up more and more of the diet: that would be carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are the necessary ingredient for bacteria in your mouth to ferment into acids that lead to cavities and abscesses. So that's what we see in the fossil record and we also see it in an interesting thing so that way you go to the dentist one of the things that your dentist will do is they start scraping on your teeth you know what they're doing they're scraping off dental calculus and, you know what? That actually also survives in the fossil record. The dental calculus is actually like a snapshot of your oral microbiome in time. And so what scientists have been able to do is sequence dental calculus throughout history, and we see prior to Agricultural Revolution when we sequence dental calculus there's . . . what we have is this certain oral biota. At the turn of the Agricultural Revolution, we see that calculus changed, we see a rise of cariogenic strands of bacteria, notably strep mutant bacteria. Then we see a second major change that coincides with the Industrial Revolution, where not only do we have a rise in these cariogenic bacteria, but they become predominant and so almost all these fossil records post-industrial revolution we have dysbiosis in the mouth and that's what's leading to the drastic fall in dental health, where cavities are today the most common disease in the world. I recently said that on a talk I was given, and someone came up to me and said that statement startled them more than anything because they never thought of cavities as a disease because it's so normalized like if you don't have cavities, you are in the far minority. So that's a little bit of the archeology.
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