I have had dental work where the slightest deviation in the height of a tooth causes extreme aggravation.
So how then do all our teeth fit together perfectly as we grow? The obvious answer is that the teeth wear away until they fit perfectly but I’m wondering if there is more to the answer.
Warning WAG
As someone who’s had braces, I can tell you that teeth move fairly easily. I’m guessing they just grow into place with each other (be it straight or crooked). My daughters baby teeth are about half way in and there are large gaps between them. I would guess that as they grow, they’ll bump in to each other and from their they’ll either push each other out of the way or grow in straight by going up instead of into each other.
Like I said, WAG, but I’m guessing what it comes down to isn’t grinding away at each other, but they just sort of do what they need to do to make it work. Kinda like a tree that grows through or over a fence.
Our teeth move around to make a perfect fit. I’ve been fitted with a few crowns over the years and was given a temporary crown every time so that the teeth wouldn’t close up while the permanent crown was being made. The last crown didn’t quite fit when it was mounted (I didn’t notice until a month later), but it has settled in pretty well.
Part of the answer is, “sometimes they don’t.” Of the people who have jaw pain from misaligned teeth, some of them have their original teeth, just the way they grew in. Sometimes, in the position where the teeth seem to fit together nicely, the jaw joints are tweaked enough to make the facial muscles hurt.
To over-simplify, the end of the lower jaw is a knob, and it fits into a dimple in the upper jaw. It isn’t a tight fit, and you can move your lower teeth around quite a bit. It is most comfortable when the knob is right in the center of the dimple. Many jaws are off a little, but not enough to hurt.
In front of a mirror, slowly open and close your mouth. Do your lower teeth track straight up and down, or does the path wiggle sideways? You can train yourself out of trouble.
I’m teetering on the edge of my knowledge, here. I’d better stop.
Teeth don’t always fit perfectly: that’s one reason they may be crooked. In my own case, my teeth were too big for my jaw, so four bicuspids had to be extracted so everything would fit.
What’s the advantage of teeth fitting perfectly? Other than to the makers of dental floss, that is?
I keep my teeth worn down by chewing on cardboard toilet-paper rolls.
I learned it from my various gerbils.
Well, obviously if the surfaces of the top and bottom teeth fit together, the food will be sliced or chewed better than if they don’t quite meet, right?
It sounds like you have never had a crown put on a molar. Most of the dentist’s time is spent working on the fit of the teeth, and any area that makes contact before the rest of that side of the mouth is immediately noticed. I was told that any irregularities could bruise the gum beneath the tooth if they weren’t taken care of.
If teeth actually did fit perfectly a lot of orthodontists would be out of work. There are some indications that crooked teeth and cavities are part of the crap-covered end of the agricultural stick. Even with modern preventative medicine we still have more problems with our teeth on average than pre-agricultural humans. Dental surgery and braces just allow us to correct those problems stemming from our lifestyle and diet.
Paleolithic remains and modern studies of hunter-gatherers show that an HG diet supports good bone and tooth development. Very few “cave men” had either crooked teeth or caries (cavities), and the few HG groups that survived to modern times have a very low incidence of either problem too. Typical rates are 1 tooth in 100 with caries; which means that one person out of three or four people might have a problem with a single tooth, or one person might have a few cavities while many other people in the group would have none. Some groups show problems from using their teeth as a tool (vice, scraper/macerator, third hand) which can cause abnormal wear, but improperly-fitting teeth and caries were pretty much not a concern.
Well, most animals seem to do fairly well without fitting teeth. Don’t they? I am thinking dogs and cats here, so I might be having a carnivore bias.
You haven’t really looked at many cat or dog mouths, have you? Their teeth usually fit very well and it’s an indication of poor health if they don’t. The functions of their teeth are slightly different because they’re optimized for carnivores and ours are omnivore teeth. They don’t have grinding molars, instead theirs are more for mashing and tearing meat. The front teeth on a cat are flat and sharp like chisels so that they can slice meat away from bones; dogs have similar teeth. The only real function the canines have is for the capture of food. They’re not really that useful for eating it once they have it.
A very good point that I did not consider when I originally posted this.