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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32634 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women

I wonder if part of that was from the old idea that "you lose a tooth for every child". Lack of proper nutrition means the developing foetus leeches nutrients from the mother's body, and if you're an ancient empiricist and you go about counting the teeth of women of child-bearing age versus men in the same age range, it's entirely possible you might end up with "men have more teeth than women".

Childbearing has an impact on the health of women, and the impact grows with the number of times a woman has been pregnant for longer than 24 weeks. Pregnancy and breastfeeding put energy demands on a woman and can cause permanent changes to a mother’s health.

What’s less well known is the relationship between parity and oral health. That’s despite a widespread customary belief that having an increasing number of children results in tooth loss. “Gain a child, lose a tooth”, or “for every child, a tooth is lost” are common proverbs in many societies. The biological basis of these beliefs is still questioned.

There are few studies on parity and tooth loss. In addition, the available results are inconsistent. Nevertheless, increasing number of children in women has been associated with tooth loss in some populations, as seen in studies in Uganda and the US.

Yeah, there's several theories like that. It's also possible he counted including wisdom teeth - because women are statistically more likely to never have (some of) their wisdom teeth break through.

The point is, he (and his followers across the centuries) evidently never just counted the teeth (or the tooth gaps) of people.

There is also some variance in wisdom teeth: most people have 4, but other numbers happen from time to time. I know some family members of mine had only 2 or 3. More than 4 is possible too.

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