In the Middle East, you can buy miswak sticks at the souk, and I expect they have been in use for many centuries. It does a very good job- freshens and cleans, no toothpaste required.
You will in 10 years when the dentist bills start racking up. Or threatening to. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! They need a toothless grin smiley. But, hey look at it this way. If you have the money, you can just have all the rotting stumps pulled out and put in a brand new set of space age polymer in their. You'll be able to chew through concrete. If you spend enough money, I bet you could get a hell of a set of teeth. Would never be as good as the originals, though, would they? I wonder what false teeth feel like? Mouthful of plastic I expect. I remember seeing a Sadam propaganda film where he was showing women how to brush their teeth with their finger if nothing else. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Must have had a miswak stick shortage.
'Course, tooth problems didn't really appear amongst humans before they came to farming. Meat itself consists of very little carbon hydrates.
Let's not forget the Romans used urine in their toothpaste and the wealthiest among them had the luxury of importing urine from Portugal, since they considered it the strongest in ingredients- ammonia. The modern toothpaste has ammonia so don't cringe. Dentures! Let's speak of those- its ghastly, but dead soldiers were scavenged for their teeth. It became so chique that Europeans would flash "Waterloo' dentures since collected teeth came from French battlefields and the Americans wore "Civil Wars". I'm forgetting something here......think think think...yes! Dentures go back all the way to the Etruscans and the technology was lost with their demise, later on they were 'invented again' but were so hard to come by because they were at first made of wood and sticking them to the palate was a problem, big problem until the spring was invented, and still another problem in that they would pop out when the mouth opened. Until the vulcanization of rubber were all dentures more or less perfected. and TOO! lest I forget- Washington, our first President, had horrible teeth, look at any picture and you’ll notice a shy man trying to keep his mouth closed. A lesson future politicians have ignored. As did Queen Elizabeth, who's molars were always falling out and lacking the hygiene, common sense, and science that we have today she would fill her gaps with cloth.
Even then there weren't much problems other than the wearing down of teeth by the grinding action of contaminations in food such as sand. The problems came with the use of sugar. But I could be wrong. Didn't look it up or anything. edit - oops, you were right In Stone Age cultures the caries rate appears to be closely related to diet. Populations having higher meat diets had lower caries rates, while populations with diets higher in vegetables had higher caries rates. Some pre-contact Eskimos have been reported to have the lowest caries rate, about 1% of all teeth. Pre-contact American Indians with mixed diets such as the Calapuya of the Willamette Valley show a caries rate of about 10% of all teeth. Pre-contact Zuni Indians with high vegetable diets had 75%. Lower class, ancient Egyptians had a very low caries rate whereas the royalty, who had diets richer in carbohydrates, had around 80% incidence of caries. http://www.dental-site.itgo.com/ancientpeople.htm I was a bit right maybe (from the same site) These figures do not present a complete assessment of caries in ancient people. The age at onset of caries, the number of lesions per tooth and the extent of the lesions would also need to be considered. The only point being made here is that caries has apparently always been present in humans. It became much more extensive in many European countries in the 17th century with the introduction of inexpensive sugar from the East Indies and the New World. Prior to this time sugar had been a luxury. Skulls from 16th century Flanders show low caries rates similar to Stone Age skulls, but 17th century skulls show an enormous increase, and the paintings of Rembrandt and other 17th century Dutch painters show many of the people with most of their teeth missing.
