Braces. They're practically a right of passage today. Between one half and three-fourths of all American

teenagers endure them at some point, or else they face a lifetime of crooked teeth.

So we can only imagine how bad ancient teenagers had it.

They must have had dental tsunamis in their mouths with horribly snarled chompers and constant aches and pains, right?

Actually, no.

Anthropologists have long known that ancient hunter-gatherers almost always had gorgeous teeth, nice and straight and even.

In fact, virtually all people had perfect teeth before modern times. It was only the Industrial Revolution that ruined our jaws.

And the consequences of this shift are pretty dramatic.

Our gnarled mouths can lead to impacted teeth and significant and

often lifelong pain. Poorly shaped jaws can interfere with breathing as well, which has been linked to heart disease and other chronic

ailments.

And far from fixing the problem, a few rogue scientists argue that modern orthodontics, despite all of our nice pretty smiles, might actually

be part of the problem. Hi, I'm Sam Keene, and you're listening to the disappearing spoon, a topsy-turvy, science-y history podcast,

where footnotes become the real story. Ancient hunter-gatherers had shockingly nice teeth.

I mean, yeah, the teeth were yellow, but in virtually every old skull ever unearthed,

the teeth were perfectly straight,

all without modern dentistry.

Which kind of makes sense if you think about it.

You don't see lions or zebras or kangaroos who need braces.

Straight teeth are natural for animals, and they used to be natural for human beings.

So what happened to us?

I got a clue about this a few months ago when I visited the Bewindi

...