Here's an interesting article, re the subject of  wisdom teeth etc., which 
blames the advent of cooking for our dental problems:-

taken from:-
http://tinyurl.com/3w78h

(Full Text follows below0:-

Human 'dental chaos' linked to evolution of cooking
14:25 19 February 2005
NewScientist.com news service
John Pickrell, Washington DC

Crooked and disordered teeth may be the result of people having evolved to 
eat relatively mushy cooked food, suggests new research.

The disarray may have developed because evolutionary pressures affecting the 
size and shape of both the front teeth and jaw conflict with those 
influencing the back teeth. This means that there is often not enough space 
in the human jaw to accommodate all our teeth.

By animal standards, human dentition is extraordinarily disordered, says 
anthropologist Peter Lucas of George Washington University in Washington DC, 
US.

"The only body parts requiring regular surgery are the teeth," says Lucas. 
"It is extraordinary that the normal development of human teeth routinely 
fails to produce 'ideal' dentition," he says - and no one has yet been able 
to offer an explanation for this phenomenon.

Mess of a mouth
Human teeth are often spatially disarrayed or "maloccluded", accounting for 
the huge number of people who seek treatment from orthodontists. This 
disarray can lead to periodontal and gum disease, because it becomes more 
difficult to clear food particles from the mouth.

Teeth can also be missing - wisdom teeth simply do not have enough space to 
fit into the jaw, and sometimes do not form at all. In contrast most other 
mammals - including our close relatives, the great apes - have very low 
frequencies of malocclusion, Lucas told New Scientist.

Lucas's theory is that human dentition began to go haywire soon after our 
early Homo ancestors learnt to chop and process food with simple tools and, 
later, to cook it. These processes greatly decrease the size and toughness 
of food. Lucas estimates, for example, that molars can be between 56% and 
82% smaller when eating cooked potato rather than raw.

Out of sync
The front teeth and jaws are primarily occupied with reducing food to a 
small enough size to consume, whereas the molars and premolars at the back 
of the mouth are used to grind down tough particles.

Lucas, speaking on Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement 
of Science meeting in Washington, DC, US, argued that since the advent of 
cooking these two processes have fallen out of sync.

"The size of particles has reduced more rapidly than the rate at which the 
[toughness] of food has changed," he says. In response the human jaw may 
have shrunk beyond the point where it can hold all the molars required to 
successfully chew tough food. Lucas will now test the idea by measuring the 
particle size and toughness of food eaten by different animals and 
correlating these with tooth and jaw measurements.

"We've evolved to eat mush," agrees paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood also of 
George Washington University, but not involved in this study.

"We're a pretty puny bunch, really, with small teeth and small jaws," he 
says. "If we couldn't get the foods we like, and we ever had to adapt 
quickly, we might be in a terrible mess because our teeth aren't equipped to 
cope with anything very substantial."

>From: PALEOFOOD automatic digest system <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Paleolithic Eating Support List <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: PALEOFOOD Digest - 16 May 2007 to 22 May 2007 (#2007-178)
>Date: Tue, 22 May 2007 16:00:00 -0400
>
>There is 1 message totalling 33 lines in this issue.
>
>Topics of the day:
>
>   1. wisdom teeth & orthodonture
>
>------=-=-=-=-=-=-=- IMPORTANT NOTICE -=-=-=-=-=-=--------
>Make sure you have a subject line that reflects your topic
>Do not have a subject that says Re: PALEOFOOD Digest - ...
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Date:    Tue, 22 May 2007 10:54:18 -0700
>From:    "C. Kuni" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: wisdom teeth & orthodonture
>
>We just returned from a orthodontic consultation for my 10 year old and two
>issues came up which I'd like to open up for discussion.
>
>First (and least important), was the question of why humans have wisdom
>teeth, since almost no one seems able to keep theirs.  The orthodontist
>attributes this dental feature to the fact that our "prehistoric grain
>foods" (oh, right) had lots of little rocks and extra fiber which wore down
>the teeth, so those teeth came forward and made room for the wisdom teeth.
>One hopes that a firm grasp of paleobiology is not prerequisite for sound
>dental practices...
>
>Second, orthodontics are offered and encouraged very early these days.  My
>10 y.o., it seems, requires an expander to make room in the upper jaw.  
>(She
>has not been on a paleo diet. I only discovered paleo myself last fall, and
>my family is making smaller, slower adjustments than I.)  It seems very
>young to be having work done, but maybe the timing of it with the
>yet-unfinished hardening of the skull plates is ideal. I will be doing more
>research on this in the next week or two.  Any comments from this group
>would be most welcome.  A trivial topic perhaps, but we've had a pretty
>quiet list for a while so I thought I'd throw it out there.
>
>Thanks,
>CK
>
>------------------------------
>
>End of PALEOFOOD Digest - 16 May 2007 to 22 May 2007 (#2007-178)
>****************************************************************

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