Teeth And The Stories They Tell

Gastropod is a podcast that I’ve ignored for a long time, thinking it’s just another show about food recipes and healthy eating. But it turns out it’s so much more than that. The show does focus on food, but from an anthropological angle, and you learn so much about us humans and our evolution.

I listened to this episode about teeth with my fiancé, after one of his many visits to the dentist, at the end of which he found out he has to go back again next year for some more drilling, pulling and replacing. I, on the other hand, have had two cavities in my entire life and when I go to the dentist for the yearly check-up they tell me I don’t even have calculus. Teeth became a regular topic of conversation in our household, as he and I compared our childhood diets, and discussed our parents’ teeth to find a possible culprit for our very different dental destinies.

So, listening to this show, “a dental detective adventure” that looks at how teeth first appeared and the stories they tell (what we ate, how much we traveled, how we evolved to eat what we eat, how we act and how we interacted with other groups in our ancestral pasts) offered a lot of insights into who we are as individuals.