Short Stuff: Wisdom Teeth
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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 Hertz edition.
Did you have your wisdom teeth come in and did you have them removed? I had them removed. Okay. I had mine removed kind of at the, now that I'm reading this, sort of a standard time. I was probably 17 years old.
Oh, not to appreciate the sedation.
Yeah.
That was my first experience with that. And I was like, oh, wow. Yeah. That was the gateway drug.
Yeah. Yeah. I remember, um, like just kind of looking around, like trying to play it off because I, I, 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.
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.
Oh, yeah.
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's usually like a later thing, like 17, maybe all the way up to mid-20s.
And that, friends, is why they call them wisdom teeth. That moniker, I hate that word, but it works. 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.
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. And we just don't need that anymore.
No, because usually people place it around the time of agriculture. You can make a case it's much later than that. But say within the last several thousand years, the human diet changed dramatically, so much so that our skulls changed 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?
Oh, buddy, you know I don't know the answer to that.
What are wisdom teeth and when do they typically come in?
Okay, but I feel like, yeah, I feel like it's definitely older than that, the skulls are.
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