This reminds me of something interesting I read in Bee Wilsonâs Consider the Fork:
âMuch of the science of modern orthodontics is devoted to creating - through rubber bands, wires, and braces - the perfect âoverbite.â An overbite refers to the way our top layer of incisors hang over the bottom layer, like a lid on a box. This is the ideal human occlusion. The opposite of an overbite is an âedge-to-edgeâ bite seen in primates such as chimpanzees, where the top incisors clash against the bottom ones, like a guillotine blade.
What the orthodontists donât tell you is that the overbite is a very recent aspect of human anatomy and probably results from the way we use our table knives. Based on surviving skeletons, this has only been a ânormalâ alignment of the human jaw for 200 to 250 years in the Western world. Before that, most human beings had an edge-to-edge bite, comparable to apes. The overbite is not a product of evolution - the time frame is far too short. Rather, it seems likely to be a response to the way we cut our food during our formative years. The person who worked this out is Professor Charles Loring Brace (born 1930), a remarkable American anthropologist whose main intellectual passion was Neanderthal man. Over decades, Brace built up the worldâs largest database on the evolution of hominid teeth. He possibly held more ancient human jaws in his hand than anyone else in the twentieth century.
As early as the 1960s, Brace had been aware that the overbite needed explaining. Initially, he assumed that it went back to the âadoption of agriculture six or seven thousand years ago.â ⌠But as his tooth database grew, Brace found that the edge-to-edge bite persisted much longer than anyone had previously assumed. In Western Europe, Brace found, the change to the overbite occurred only in the late eighteenth century, starting with âhigh status individuals.â
Why? There was no drastic alteration to the nutritional components of a high-status diet at this time. ⌠What changed most substantially by the late eighteenth century was not what was eaten but how it was eaten. This marked the time when it became normal in upper- and middle-class circles to eat with a table knife and fork, cutting food into little pieces before it was eatenâŚ.
In premodern times, Brace surmises that the main method of eating would have been something he christened âstuff-and-cut.â As the name suggests, it is not the most elegant way to dine. It goes something like this. First, grasp the food in one of your hands. Then clamp the end of it forcefully between your teeth. Finally, separate the main hunk of food from the piece in your mouth, either with a decisive tug of your hand or by using a cutting implement if you have one at hand, in which case you must be careful not to slice your own lips. This was how our ancestors, armed only with a sharpened flint, or, later, a knife, dealt with chewy food, especially meat. The âstuff-and-cutâ school of etiquette continued long after ancient times. Knives changed - from iron to steel, from wood-handled to porcelain-handled - but the method remained.
The growing adoption of knife-and-fork eating in the late eighteenth century marked the demise of âstuff-and-cutâ in the West. ⌠From medieval to modern times, the fork went from being a weird thing, a pretentious object of ridicule, to being an indispensable part of civilized dining. Instead of stuffing and cutting, people now ate food by pinning it down with the fork and sawing off little pieces with the table knife, popping pieces into the mouth so small that they hardly needed chewing. As knives became blunter, so the morsels generally needed to be softer, reducing the need to chew still further.
Braceâs data suggest that this revolution in table manners had an immediate impact on teeth. He has argued that the incisors - from the Latin incidere, âto cutâ - are misnamed. Their real purpose is not to cut but to clamp food in the mouth - as in the âstuff-and-cutâ method of eating. âIt is my suspicion,â he wrote, âthat if the incisors are used in such a manner several times a day from the time that they first begin to erupt, they will become positioned so that they normally occlude edge to edge.â Once people start cutting their food up very small using a knife and fork, and popping the morsels into their mouths, the clamping function of the incisors ceases, and the incisors continue to erupt until the top layer no longer meets the bottom layer: creating an overbite.
We generally think that our bodies are fundamental and unchanging, whereas such things as table manners are superficial: we might change our manners from time to time, but we canât be changed by them. Brace turned this on its head. Our supposedly normal and natural overbite - this seemingly basic aspect of modern human anatomy - is actually a product of how we behave at the table.
How can we be sure, as Brace is, that it was the cutlery that brought about this change in our teeth? The short answer is that we canât. Braceâs discovery raises as many questions as it answers. Modes of eating were far more varied than his theory makes room for. Stuff-and-cut was not the only way people ate in preindustrial Europe, and not all food required the incisorâs clamp; people also supped on soups and potages, nibbled on crumbly pies, spooned up porridge and polenta. Why did these soft foods not change our bite much sooner? Braceâs love of Neanderthals may have blinded him to the extent to which table manners, even before the knife and fork, frowned upon gluttonous stuffing. Posidonius, a Greek historian (born c. 135 BC) complained that the Celts were so rude, they âclutch whole joints and bite,â suggesting that polite Greeks did not. Moreover, just because the overbite occurs at the same time as the knife and fork does not mean that one was caused by the other. Correlation is not cause.
Yet Braceâs hypothesis does seem the best fit with the available data. When he wrote his original 1977 article on the overbite, Brace himself was forced to admit that the evidence he had so far marshaled was âunsystematic and anecdotal.â He would spend the next three decades hunting out more samples to improve the evidence base.
For years, Brace was tantalized by the thought that if his thesis was correct, Americans should have retained the edge-to-edge bite for longer than Europeans, because it took several decades longer for knife-and-fork eating to become accepted in America. After years of fruitless searching for dental samples, Brace managed to excavate an unmarked nineteenth-century cemetery in Rochester, New York, housing bodies from the insane asylum, workhouse, and prison. To Braceâs great satisfaction, he found that out of fifteen bodies whose teeth and jaws were intact, ten - two-thirds of the sample - had an edge-to-edge bite.
What about China? âStuff-and-cutâ is entirely alien to the Chinese way of eating⌠The highly chopped style of Chinese food and the corresponding use of chopsticks had become commonplace around nine hundred years before the fork and knife were in normal use in Europe, by the time of the Song dynasty (960-1279 AD), starting with the aristocracy and gradually spreading to the rest of the population. If Brace was correct, then the combination of tou and chopsticks should have left its mark on Chinese teeth much earlier than the European table knife.
The supporting evidence took a while to show up. On his eternal quest for more samples of teeth, Brace found himself in the Shanghai Natural History Museum. There, he saw the pickled remains a graduate student from the Song dynasty era, exactly the time when chopsticks became the normal method of transporting food from plate to mouth.
The fellow was an aristocratic young man, an official, who died, as the label explained, around the time he would have sat for the imperial examinations. Well, there he was, in a vat floating in a pickling fluid with his mouth wide open and looking positively revolting. But there it was: the deep overbite of the modern Chinese!
Over subsequent years, Brace has analyzed many Chinese teeth and found that - with the exception of peasants, who retain an edge-to-edge bite well into the twentieth century - the overbite does indeed emerge 800-1000 years sooner in China than in Europe. The differing attitude to knives in East and West had a graphic impact on the alignment of our jaws.â
Itâs a rather interesting book. Itâs got other interesting stuff in it, e.g. about knife culture in Medieval Europe:
âIn medieval and Renaissance Europe, you carried your own knife everywhere with you and brought it out at mealtimes when you needed to. Almost everyone had a personal eating knife in a sheath dangling from a belt. The knife at a manâs girdle could equally well be used for chopping food or defending himself against enemies. Your knife was as much a garment - like a wristwatch now - as a tool. A knife was a universal possession, often your most treasured one. Like a wizardâs wand in Harry Potter, the knife was tailored to its owner. Knife handles were made of brass, ivory, rock crystal, glass, and shell; of amber, agate, mother of pearl, or tortoiseshell. They might be carved or engraved with images of babies, apostles, flowers, peasants, feathers, or doves. You would no more eat with another personâs knife than you would brush your teeth today with a strangerâs toothbrush. You wore your knife so habitually that - as with a watch - you might start to regard it as a part of yourself and forget it was there. A sixth-century text (St. Benedictâs Rule) reminded monks to detach knives from their belts before they went to bed, so they didnât cut themselves in the night.
There was a serious danger of this because knives then, with their daggerlike shape, really were sharp. They needed to be, because they might be called upon to tackle everything from rubbery cheese to a crusty loaf. Aside from clothes, a knife was the one possession every adult needed. It has been often assumed, wrongly, that knives, as violent objects, were exclusively masculine. But women wore them too. A painting from 1640 by H.H. Kluber depicts a rich Swiss family preparing to eat a meal of meat, bread, and apples. The daughters of the family have flowers in their hair, and dangling from their red dresses are silvery knives, attached to silken ropes tied around their waists. With a knife close to your body at all times, you would have been very familiar with its construction.
The habit of carrying your own sharp knife with you was as much a bedrock of Western culture as Christianity, the Latin alphabet, and the rule of law. Until, suddenly, it wasnât.â
Also, having special knives made for silver for fish was originally a practical thing, because before stainless steel lemon would react with steel knives and make the fish taste bad.
