Agriculture helped form the modern world but also created a nightmare for our teeth

The agricultural revolution changed everything, and it's tough to overstate this fact.No longer tethered to roaming animal herds, or reliant on foraged berries, learning to grow our own food some 10,000 years ago allowed (and forced) us to settle down.But that crucial Neolithic shift came with a cost that haunts humanity to this day: It devastated our teeth.Farming grains and other carbohydrate-rich foods freed up a lot of time for our ancestors. In turn, this helped spur the development of culture, art, trade, science, and all the other things that go into complex human civilization (like news sites you read on the internet).Yet this flood of carbs made our mouthslong-adapted to a more complex dieta fertile breeding ground for one type of bacteria called Streptococcus mutans.S. mutans is most commonly associated with cavities and tooth decay. It feeds off the carbs, including sugars, that get stuck in our teeth, metabolizing them into lactic acid. This acid then eats away at dental enamel and rots our teeth.The bacteria is basically built for the human mouth, and is passed down from mothers to children during infancy.However, our teeth hadn't really evolved to deal with it in large numbers, and researchers used genetics to discover that, around 10,000 years ago, S. mutans started to grow exponentiallyright in time with the rise of agriculture.After that first Neolithic bump for S. mutans, bacterial diversity in the human mouth pretty much remained consistent through the Middle Ages.Our initial switch to farming wasn't the only time we gave a boost to S. mutans, though. During the Industrial Revolution 150 years ago, another major agricultural shift occurred: We introduced an enormous amount of processed flour and sugar into our diets.This lit the powder keg we'd built for S. mutans, helping it crowd out other bacteria species to become the dominant dental bacteria, form stubborn and gnarly plaques of biofilm, and more rapidly chew away at our teeth.Join the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: The awful things that happen if you don't brush and floss your teeth
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