Short Stuff: Wisdom Teeth

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1:12Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave. So this is Short Stuff, the, uh, I don't know, it hurts edition.

1:22Josh Clark:Did you have your wisdom teeth come in, and did you have them removed? I had them removed. Oh, okay. I had mine removed. Now that I'm reading this, sort of a standard time, I was probably 17 years old.

1:39Chuck Bryant:Only up to appreciate the sedation.

1:42Josh Clark:Yeah, that was my first experience with that. And I was like, oh, wow. That was the gateway drug.

1:47Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I remember just kind of looking around, trying to play it off because it wasn't connecting in my head that they were the ones who were making me feel this way. Like I was in public or something.

2:00Josh Clark:Yeah, very strange. But yeah, we're talking about wisdom teeth, a.k.a. the third molar, which sometimes start to pop in there. By the way, I'm very turned off by how many times you type the word erupt in this thing. You don't like that, huh? I think there were like five or six erupts.

2:18Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah.

2:19Josh Clark:So, yeah, it was not pleasant to read that over and over. But I will use it once just to honor you. Okay, thanks. They can erupt from the gums. Well, they can start to come in as early as like five years old and as old as 15. But when they actually erupt, that's twice. That can usually come. That's usually like a later thing, like 17, maybe all the way up to mid 20s.

2:43Chuck Bryant:And that, friends, is why they call them wisdom teeth. That moniker. I hate that word, but it works.

2:51Josh Clark:Yeah.

2:51Chuck Bryant:It dates back to the Greeks. I don't know if the Hellenic Greeks or the post-Bronze Age Greeks, who knows? But their word for wisdom teeth was Odontius Sophius. And that is the teeth of wisdom is what that means. And the whole point is that these teeth come in much later than your other teeth. You've got some experience in life by the time your wisdom teeth come in. So that's why they call them wisdom teeth.

3:17Josh Clark:That's right. And if you're wondering why we even have these teeth that are many times removed to begin with, there's been a lot of debate and theories over the years. But it seems pretty clear to me, and I think most people basically agree, is that we needed them back then when tuk-tuk was out and had a bigger jaw to fit these things and was gnawing on nuts and raw meat and stuff like that. not cooked food, in other words, not soft stuff, that they needed these things. They had larger jaws, they had bigger teeth, and they needed them to chew and grind all this stuff down to palatable-sized, swallowable stuff.

3:59Josh Clark:And we just don't need that anymore.

4:01Chuck Bryant:No, because usually people place it around the time of agriculture. You can make a case that it's much later than that. But say within the last several thousand years, the human diet change dramatically, so much so that our skulls change shape. My question is this, Chuck, didn't our skulls, the skulls of modern humans, change shape much further back than just a few thousand years?

4:25Josh Clark:Oh, buddy, you know I don't know the answer to that.

4:27Chuck Bryant:Okay, but I feel like, yeah, I feel like it's definitely older than that, the skulls are, but the people, when you start researching wisdom teeth, they're like, yeah, the human diet got soft, so our teeth got kind of wuss and our skulls got shorter and smaller. And hence, when we get wisdom teeth, there's just not enough room for them because we don't need them anymore. But stupid natural selection hasn't caught up yet and keeps producing wisdom teeth in modern Homo sapiens that don't need it because we eat a deviled ham. Right.

5:04Josh Clark:I mean, that makes sense to me, right? You're just saying the timeline doesn't match up?

5:07Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense for sure. It's the timeline. Yeah. Okay.

5:11Josh Clark:Yeah. I don't question the timeline. That's your first mistake.

5:14Chuck Bryant:You know what, though? When I was researching this, I found there's apparently a creationist argument. They use the wisdom teeth like as a vestigial thing, as an argument for creationism, because apparently a lot of people are like, well, it's clearly evolution. Explain that, creationists. And they're like, how about this? You're supposed to have three molars, but because of this modern human diet that we all agree is making the third molar superfluous, that's what did it. You're supposed to. But it's the human intervention that kept us from being able to use it. And that's the problem. So I thought that was kind of fascinating.

5:57Chuck Bryant:Interesting. Take that, podcaster. Yeah, because they took the argument that people who believe in natural selection use and turned it on them. They flipped the script. Very well put. All right.

6:12Josh Clark:So we have four of these. Not all of them erupt. What else are you going to say? Poke? Moist? Present themselves.

6:22Chuck Bryant:Okay.

6:23Josh Clark:Have a coming out party? No, that's good.

6:25Chuck Bryant:Present themselves.

6:26Josh Clark:Debutante ball? Show up. Yeah, show up. And about eight of 10 people, usually one tooth will not come in. And the teeth that don't come in are called impacted teeth. If you've ever heard like, oh, you have impacted wisdom teeth. That's what they're talking about. Sometimes they don't develop at all in some people. That's called a genesis. But the impaction is sort of the start of the show here because that is why you will generally have them removed. Either they're impacted or they're coming through and just crowding things and making life a problem for your other molars.

7:01Chuck Bryant:Like poor Lisa Simpson when they showed that age progression of what she would look like if she didn't have dental insurance.

7:09Josh Clark:Yeah, that's right.

7:10Chuck Bryant:Or braces. I say we take our break and then come back and talk about wisdom teeth.

7:15Josh Clark:All right, let's do it.

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9:16Josh Clark:So the main reason why they're impacted to begin with is kind of what we've been talking about. There's just not enough space back there for some people. And when they're developing, that space is like, you know, there's teeth there for most people. And so those teeth can get really impacted by the wisdom teeth not being impacted.

9:40Chuck Bryant:Wow. That was great, man. Thanks. Yeah, there's just not enough room because your other teeth have shown up, right? Another one, this is the thing that really kind of comes home to me. Your jaw might not actually be the size that it would be if you ate harder foods. And in fact, I saw it recommended to make sure that your kids have a nice set of chompers as they get older. Like once they start eating solid food, start giving them stuff that challenges their teeth. Because as you're chewing, the more you chew, that promotes bone growth in your jaw. And it can actually make your jaw a little longer.

10:20Chuck Bryant:So that if your jaw is just slightly longer, you're going to have that room for the third molar that you otherwise wouldn't. Well, again, we come back to the Western industrialized diet that is soft enough that the teeth aren't challenged quite as much. So the jaw doesn't grow quite as well to accommodate the third molar. I think I might have just I think I might have just been born again, I guess. Did you square the timeline? Yeah. And so you have room for the third molar after all.

10:52Josh Clark:That's right. But space isn't like every bit of this. It's not just about space. There is some stuff about it that science really hasn't explained why they might become impacted because apes don't have impacted wisdom teeth, which I don't think we mentioned. Some of our primate friends, you know, have wisdom teeth still. Which is great. Good for them.