The hunter gatherer lifestyle works nicely until you get injured, have teeth problems, get sick, or get pregnant. It also helps to be male and both physically and mentally able, so if you aren’t good luck with that.
As someone who’s had wisdom teeth issues I’m quite happy to have modern medicine rather than being in the stone age and just having to deal with a broken tooth section rubbing against a nerve…
Yeah, I’ve had enough medical issues that I’m grateful for modern medicine too. That being said, it could be conceivable to move to more of a hunter-gatherer model of living with modern necessities. It would certainly be interesting to see what that might look like on a societal scale.
“Hunter-gatherers had really good teeth,” says Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. “[But] as soon as you get to farming populations, you see this massive change. Huge amounts of gum disease. And cavities start cropping up.”
Additionally, they had better spacing due to eating tougher foods like high fiber items and tendons. So there’s less dental impacting like we have with wisdom teeth.
There is of course merit to us having active lifestyles, controlling calorie intake, and balancing our diets, but that’s in addition to the fact that we live almost 3x as long as we used to due to modern medicine, so we should continue to follow modern medicine, science, and nutrition.
Nothing in this article addressed tooth decay or dental formation issues.
Also from the article:
Hunter-gatherers who live until the age of 15 typically experience a lifespan of around 72 years. Among elderly hunter-gatherers, the incidence of diseases such as cancer and high blood pressure is very low. When recalculating the average lifespan excluding child mortality, the average lifespan for hunter-gatherers ranges from 68 to 78 years.
I also never said we shouldn’t follow science or modern medicine.
The hunter gatherer lifestyle works nicely until you get injured, have teeth problems, get sick, or get pregnant. It also helps to be male and both physically and mentally able, so if you aren’t good luck with that.
As someone who’s had wisdom teeth issues I’m quite happy to have modern medicine rather than being in the stone age and just having to deal with a broken tooth section rubbing against a nerve…
Yeah, I’ve had enough medical issues that I’m grateful for modern medicine too. That being said, it could be conceivable to move to more of a hunter-gatherer model of living with modern necessities. It would certainly be interesting to see what that might look like on a societal scale.
Dental health of hunter gathers looks like it was much better than ours:
Additionally, they had better spacing due to eating tougher foods like high fiber items and tendons. So there’s less dental impacting like we have with wisdom teeth.
I went to eating like the great plains American first people about 2 years ago and haven’t brushed my teeth since
About three months ago I had a dentist clean the plaques off my teeth and check them, to ensure I wasn’t too misguided and my teeth had no new damage
The ancient people with great teeth also had bigger heads and bigger jaws. They could fit wisdom teeth
Yeah things didn’t really get better until Modern Dentistry so it took several thousand years to get better than hunter-gatherer level
While true, they exist today, and have a life expectancy of like 30. So mostly they just die before their teeth decay.
https://medium.com/@kennamai/the-truth-of-hunter-gatherers-the-healthiest-but-lower-life-expectancy-why-5bb2f149e165
There is of course merit to us having active lifestyles, controlling calorie intake, and balancing our diets, but that’s in addition to the fact that we live almost 3x as long as we used to due to modern medicine, so we should continue to follow modern medicine, science, and nutrition.
Nothing in this article addressed tooth decay or dental formation issues.
Also from the article:
I also never said we shouldn’t follow science or modern medicine.
Actually patriarchy only came with settling down. They actually had gender equality, which is pretty cool!