A dental anthropologist has made a life studying mouths in Africa.
The Hazda foragers of Tanzania have no need for braces. Their mouths support an average of 20 back teeth in comparison to Westerners, who generally have a crowded total of 16.
The article, It’s not that your teeth are too big: your jaw is too small?, tells us that our soft food diet does not encourage our jaw bones to grow like our African counterparts.
Are extractions and braces the best way to solve our crooked choppers?
Will evolution change our descendants and put orthodontists out of business?
How interesting that we have the ability to study such things!
Not wanting to give anything away from season three of The Good Place, I’ll share just a snippet of thought….
Humans evolved from…
me versus us: I will sacrifice my freedom for the good of the group. Cooperative hunting, growing, and protection.
To…
us versus them: Our group against your group.
Aren’t you curious about what’s coming next?
Who is studying that?
And finally, I’m reading Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks by August Turak and this thought keeps playing in my mind…
This book—dare I say it—dogmatically insists that the purpose of every human life, whether we realize it or not, is to be transformed from a selfish into a selfless person.
A pretty tall order?
Perhaps, and I tell myself it’s what we’re evolving toward.