Why wisdom teeth

[Safe-Keeper]

Okay, so I had a wisdom tooth removed by surgery today, and came to wonder - why wisdom teeth? Did we have wider mouths or smaller teeth before? Is it just a bad mutation that got passed on?

[shadron]

Wider mouths.

[BenBurch]

Some people do not have them. If modern dentistry had not intervened, those people ought to be marginally more fit than those who still get them, and so ought to have been more reproductively successful, and eventually nobody would have had them.

However, because we can intervene and solve the issues they cause, this is unlikely to ever occur.

[Michael Redman]

The space is only a problem if you have all your original teeth when the new ones come in. Perhaps we lost teeth so much more frequently before modern dental care that we benefitted from a couple of later additions.

Anyway, I have all mine, and they're not realy a problem.

[Loss Leader]

Bigger jaws.

[Madalch]

Before we had nicely refined food, our teeth wore down a lot faster. Wisdom teeth had plenty of room in the jaw of someone who spent a lifetime eating stone-ground bread or roots dug up from the ground and promptly roasted.

[I Ratant]

Bad design.

[rjh01]

1Mtr3Cum74A

Wisdom teeth exist because of our herbivore ancestors.
Mentioned at about 3:34 of the video.

[dropzone]

Bad design.No, excellent design, shared with all of our relatives, including sharks.

Two of my lower second molars are held together by both rudimentary dental science (they filled their cavities decades ago) and hope. Were they to break down so completely that I or my (long-lost) insurance refused to play for the crowns they still require permanent care, though I'm playing it by this week's income. Like with the crowns and root canals they might get better next year, but I can still chew. We are designed with redundant teeth but that does not mean more than we have peripheral playthings before they are needed. And it's a design we retain for some time after our prime reproductive years, after when we need to cut our dinner down to smaller pieces, as has been demonstrated in Neanderthal burials, much less burials of Modern Humans. That suggests that old farts still retained value in the tribe.

[I Ratant]

Hadn't noticed the rows of teeth waiting to replace any on the front row that got lost in the evening's steak.
Had one pulled... nothing came into its place. Just a nice gap to play with with my tongue there.
Beavers need to chew to keep their teeth short.
Other mammals suffer the same condition, the teeth can outgrow usefulness.