Evolution Bite - Analytical Portal Polit.ru

The Bombbor publishing house represents the book of Sandra Cannes and Paul Erlich, The Evolution Bite . Where does a modern person get the wrong bite, crooked teeth and other deformations of the jaw ”(translation of Ivan Chorny).

A huge number of children and adults around the world have problems with a bite, and these problems are not only aesthetic in nature, they can cause serious diseases. In his book, a dentist and doctor of medical sciences Sandra Kan and Paul R. Erlich, a well-known biologist and specialist in the field of demographic research, study the causes and consequences of improper development of the jaw in a modern person, and also represent a new look at orthodontics, prevention and treatment of teeth. In their opinion, due to insufficient development of the jaw, apnea, difficulty breathing, heart disease, depression and other dangerous conditions can occur. They are divided by their innovative approach and offer simple adjustments (for example, the transition to more rigid food) that will help from a very young age to form and develop the jaw so that in the future the child has good health. The authors offer to think and pay attention to how you breathe, chew, sleep to develop more healthy habits and make your life better.

We offer to read a fragment of the book.

We found that changes in the structure of the jaw in connection with the new diet and widespread urbanization were first noticed and documented in the 1830s. For two decades before the US Civil War in the United States, Philadelphia’s lawyer named George Cathlin, a talented artist, made several trips to the west of America, who subsequently glorified him as a portraitist and ethnographer (a scientist who explores and describes different peoples and their culture), specializing in the indigenous residents of the country.

Seeing a group of Indians who passed by Philadelphia, he was admired and decided to engage in a documentary description of their lifestyle. In total, according to his statements, he visited more than one hundred and fifty tribes, the total number of representatives of which exceeded two million people, throughout the Western hemisphere. Portraits of the Indians, drawn by Cathlin, before contact with Western culture changed their own, are an invaluable archive, which is now stored in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

Traveling among people relatively isolated from European settlers, he was amazed as the structure and posture of the face of the Indians differ from what he saw in people of Western origin, among whom he grew up. Long before modern scientists like Richard Klein, he noticed how the jaws of preserved skulls differ.

Figure 11. The book “Close your mouth and save your life”, written and illustrated by Kathlin in 1861. The name chosen by the author indicates that back in the 1800s, he understood how important it was for health to keep his mouth closed.
George Cathlin (1796–1872), self -portrait (right)

Being among the Indians of the Mandans tribe, numbering nine thousand people, he studied several hundred bleached remains. “I was extremely struck by an incredibly small number of children's skulls, and even more in how good the condition (practically without defects) were their beautiful even teeth, held together by the lower jaw attached to the rest of the skull.”

He noticed that the American Indians slept on the street and almost always held their lips closed. Their women fed children with their chests and, taking away from the nipple, immediately covered their mouths with their mouths. Mothers of European origin did not do such things. The Indians called the whites not only “pale -faced”, but also “black -bearing”, as they often saw them with lifted mouths and a sagging lower jaw. In addition, the indigenous Americans, who did not maintain close contact with European civilization, were usually, as Kathleen paid attention to, much healthier than strangers who arrived from the ocean. He saw with his own eyes how few children's skulls were in burials, and interviewed many elderly people about children's mortality. In the Mandans tribe, he learned the following:

“According to the leader, the death of a child under ten years old was a rarity. I studied in the cemetery located on the outskirts of their settlements, the remains that were wrapped in the skins and lay separately on small flooring from logs on the lawn-only about 150.

And only eleven children managed to find the bodies of only eleven children. This confirmed the low mortality rate of children younger than the said age. Human skulls, lying in large numbers under these flooring, convinced me even more of this ... I observed evidence of such exceptional health among children in many other tribes that I had to visit. The absence of mandans of physical and mental defects at once is not any exceptional feature of this people. Almost without exception, this applies to all tribes on the American continent living in primitive conditions in accordance with the traditional way of life. ”

In those days, children's mortality in the Old World was high. According to European mortality tables in the 1850s, about a quarter of all children did not live up to five years and only every fourth lived up to 25 years. This indicator in large cities was even higher, and it can be assumed that in settlements in the west of North America many also died at an early age. Children of the indigenous inhabitants of the country were clearly much more healthy.

Kathleen, originally accustomed to breathing his mouth, noticed that the Indians never did this and were extremely healthy. As a result, he taught himself to breathe his nose:

“Who, like me, from an early age, to a middle age, because of this exhausting and unnatural habit, suffered from all kinds of ailments, and then made a strong-willed decision and abandoned it, acquiring a new joy of life and a sense of peace, thanks to which he was able to survive, despite all the difficulties and deprivation, until the advanced age and at the same time did not fully realize its harm?”

He wanted to convince everyone else of the benefits of Indian habits, and for this purpose he wrote a small book “Breath of Life” (1861), subsequently called “Close your mouth and save your life”. In it, he condemned the mouth breathing, attributing a number of all kinds of diseases to him, including problems with his teeth, thereby surprisingly foresaw the modern epidemic of jaw defects, which has become fertile soil for the prosperity of the orthodontists. Here is another small excerpt from the book of Kathlin, which makes it clear how seriously it was to this problem:

“And from the most ugly, disgusting and dangerous habit of the human race, <...> sleep with an open mouth, you can get rid of only one single reliable and effective way-to wean out from infancy. <...> With age, the muscles are unnaturally stretched due to constant tension, and solving the problem is much more difficult, but it is still possible. You can apply a bandage by fixing the jaw during sleep, but this will not help close your mouth, as well as any other conceivable device. In this way, one can achieve temporary benefits and partial relief of symptoms. At the same time, I believe that there is only one effective deliverance from this habit for an adult, namely, the realization that premature death lies in wait for everyone whose mouth and lungs are open to all sorts of malaria and [temperature changes] that can destroy. ”

Some ideas of a traveler at first sight may seem bizarre or at least eccentric. He wrote more than 150 years ago, believing that malaria was associated with rotary breathing and “poisonous particles in the air” - many doctors of those days shared similar views. His admiration for the American Indians, whom he considered the example of “real people” living in harmony with nature, idealized in the Enlightenment, was also extravagant for his time. In addition, he quite rightly saw in them the victims of Europeans. But Kathleen was primarily an incredibly observant person who was much ahead of his time, recognizing the threats associated with rotary breathing. Moreover, the painter was, as the research conducted later on, on the right track, albeit not always bringing the right arguments.

Figure 12. Illustrations from Kathlin's book “Close your mouth and save your life”, on which a natural dream (left) is opposed to an unnatural (right)

Anthropologists have discovered that the size of the human mouth has long been reduced. Since people used stone tools for at least 3.3 million years, a similar change could occur during this period. Stone guns allowed people to significantly increase the amount of meat in the diet, since the ability to cut it reduced the number of chewing movements necessary for extracting nutrients. As a result, the need for a large, powerful jaw decreased. Similarly, stone tools were used as a mortar for crushing food on small, easily absorbed pieces. Heat treatment also reduced the chewing time necessary to obtain nutrients necessary for the large brain that consists of a lot of energy. However, the guns appeared as much as one and a half million years before a person learned to cook food.

As we already mentioned at the beginning, Paleoanthropologist from Stanford University Richard Klein, a leading specialist in the fossils of hominids, told us that he had never met ancient skulls with improper bite. This pattern was confirmed by the Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman, who wrote in his excellent book the human body as follows:

“In the collection of the museum where I work, there are thousands of ancient remains from around the world. Most of the found skulls, the owners of which lived in the last few centuries, are a real nightmare of a dentist: bought teeth with many cavities and traces of infections, and about a quarter have retained teeth. In the turtles of farmers of the pre -industrial era, there are also many cavities and painful in the form of abscesses, but the retained teeth of wisdom have less than 5 % of them. For comparison, most hunting hunters teeth were almost in perfect condition. Apparently, in the Stone Age there was practically no need for orthodontists and dentists. "

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the crowding of the teeth was registered in one sample of the remains from France two thousand years ago. And more recently, a man of modern Kafsachi found in the Israeli cave, whose age, according to estimates, was one hundred thousand years old, from a single skeleton of a modern skeleton from an anatomical point of view.

Figure 13. Daniel Lieberman, Harvard biologist and evolutionary of the human skull (photography of Jim Harrison). On the right shows a skull age of 1000 years, belonging to a thirty-five-year-old Philistic woman, found in excavations in Israel. Once again, he clearly demonstrates the correct bite characteristic of people of the pre -industrial era (photography by Jim Hollander/US Environmental Protection Agency)

These examples demonstrate that the wrong bite was found even among our ancient ancestors, which is not surprising, given a huge variety of their habitats. Perhaps the diet of the ancient Frenchmen consisted of unusually soft food - in any case, the relatively small gutters of their teeth indicate this. This problem is also found in modern traditional societies - such cases, for example, were recorded among one Amazonian population, where closely related ties flourish. This demonstrates the possibility of violation of the normal development of the jaw and face within the framework of one population due to genetic factors. It is likely that Kafzachi’s crooked teeth from a cave could appear due to his genes if closely related marriages were common in the population.

At the same time, there are undeniable confirmations that among the hunters-gatherers, crooked teeth were a huge rarity, and their crowding was found among the first farmers and people of dark centuries much less often than in populations of the industrial era. Comparison of 146 medieval skulls found in abandoned cemeteries in Norway showed a “significant increase in the prevalence and severity of the incorrect bite over the past 400–700 years in Oslo”. The skulls, which demonstrated that these people “strongly” or “obviously” needed orthodontic treatment, were 36 % of ancient and 65 % of modern samples. In Sweden, where 10 % of the modern population was recognized as “extremely needy” in orthodontic treatment, more than 100 skulls of the medieval era were studied, and the wrong bite among them was “much less common” than the modern residents of Scandinavia.

As for the issue of jaw size, the Swedish orthodontist Lennard Lisell conducted extremely thorough measurements of skeletal remains extracted in the medieval cemetery during excavations associated with the construction of the airfield in 1951. He worked with the most preserved teeth of 97 adults of all 250 skeletons of the XI - XIII centuries. He also checked whether these samples of medieval Swedish skulls were a representative sample from the general population of the people who lived then, and compared the results of his measurements with previously published data on modern Danish and Swedish turtles. Like a number of other scientists, with the help of the information received, he was able to demonstrate a noticeable decrease in the width of the jaw since the Middle Ages.

The results of Lisell were confirmed by the study of the dentist Christopher Lavella, who compared the 210 lower jaws of the skulls of the Romano-British period (43–400 e.), The Anglo-Saxon period (410–1066 E. E.), as well as the 19th century. It turned out that the size of the British jaw also began to decrease with the onset of the modern era (and a decrease in the amount of rough food in the diet). The well-preserved remains of the age of four to five centuries have practically no signs of improper bite. In addition, there is a lot of data confirming the conclusion of anthropologists that the jaw and face no longer grow to the same size and shape as they were observed in the past.

As Robert Korruchcini, a leading anthropologist specializing in his teeth, says everything indicates that “the spread of improper bite over the past 150 years has accelerated in technologically developed societies. And the changes that occurred over the previous 6,000 years were relatively small. ” For example, a comparison of the skulls of Austrian men of the 1880s and 1990s showed more cases of incorrect bite in the latter.