Eating and cooking utensils may make our lives easier and more etiquette-friendly, but they've had a few unintentional historical consequences. For example, consider the fork—which, incidentally, is the title of a book by Bee Wilson documenting the evolution of cooking and eating technology. Wilson writes that overbites didn't become common until people started eating with a knife and fork. Here's how it happened:
In an interview with The Atlantic, Wilson quotes American anthropologist, C. Loring Brace, who states that prior to 250 years ago human beings had an edge to edge bite ("our teeth were aligned liked a guillotine, with the top layer clashing against the bottom layer") but that changed once human beings started using cutlery. As Wilson says,
What changed 250 years ago was the adoption of the knife and fork, which meant that we were cutting chewy food into small morsels before eating it. Previously, when eating something chewy such as meat, crusty bread or hard cheese, it would have been clamped between the jaws, then sliced with a knife or ripped with a hand—a style of eating Professor Brace has called "stuff-and-cut."... The first time I read Brace's work, I was truly astonished. So often, we assume that the tools we use for eating are more or less irrelevant — at most, a question of manners. I found it remarkable that they could have this graphic impact on the human body.
Other historical cooking and eating changes: how cooking pots saved the toothless ("pots made it possible for the first time to cook nourishing stew-like meals that required no chewing but could, rather, be drunk. So having teeth was no longer necessary for survival"); how poorly-lined copper pots in the 19th century often led to copper poisoning; and how the invention of the gas oven saved millions from smoke and indoor air pollution previously caused by open-fire cookery.
Read More: How Forks Gave Us Overbites and Pots Saved the Toothless | The Altantic
Related: Where Did That Come From? 15 Quick Peeks Into Food History
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As to open fire cookery, the invention of the wood/coal stove helped to reduce smoky rooms by replacing the hearth for cooking in all but the most rural homes for sometime afterwords, and eventually, even those got wood/coal stoves,
The gas stove came about around the 1820's with the first patents granted in the US, but all of this came about at the beginning of the industrial age.
That much I got from Wikipedia while researching the evolution of the kitchen for a post I'm working on.
Funny that I had braces to correct the fact that my front teeth came together "guillotine style."
Wow! Interesting reading!
Well this just sounds ridiculous. What about people who use forks everyday and don't have overbites. And what about native tribes in South America and Africa who don't use forks and do have overbites
250 years ago? As in 1762? I'm sorry, interesting idea, but I doubt the timing very very very much.
As a dentist, I disagree with Wilson's assertion that using utensils is related to humans developing overbites. Human occlusion has many factors, but using forks isn't one of them.
Well according to Wikipedia, that's about the time that fork usage became widespread:
It was not until the 18th century that the fork became commonly used in Great Britain, although some sources say forks were common in France, England and Sweden already by the early 17th century. The fork did not become popular in North America until near the time of the American Revolution. The curved fork that is used in most parts of the world today, was developed in Germany in the mid 18th century.
I think herms is over-thinking the term 'overbite'. The author doesn't seem to be referring to a dramatic misalignment of teeth that we think of today when we hear the term, but merely the fact that, when you close your jaw at rest, your upper teeth extend past your lower ones. That doesn't sound ridiculous at all, but explains a pretty simple evolutionary change.
Yeah, but in just 250 years? I also don't see how it could possibly evolve that way -- how were our ancestors with overbites more successful and able to reproduce more than those with "guillotine teeth"? I don't remember hearing about a massive die-out in the 1700s of people who couldn't figure out how to eat anymore because they didn't have overbites and couldn't reproduce in the face of an onslaught of forks. Am I missing something? LOL!
The contention was that the fashion of forks did not effect our evolution in the last 250 years. On the subject of forks, try a broader search than wiki and north america. On the subject of evolution, I encourage you to read a little more overall. It is a fascinating and complex subject. A brief look at photos of skulls from various parts of the world disproves the amusing assertion of this piece.
Without reading the book, can I suggest that we're not talking about evolution or adaptation (wherein a trait is selected for as the optimum for survival then then passed down to progeny through increased fitness, a.k.a. having more offspring than any other member of a population), but instead acclimatization (gradual change over time in response to repeated environmental stressors). Using a fork could lead to increased occurrences of overbite in populations that use them, but that trait would not be genetic.