Why do we have wisdom teeth?

"Wisdom teeth, also known as third molars, are the last teeth to erupt in your mouth. This generally occurs between the ages of 17 and 25, a time of life that has been called the "Age of Wisdom.""

I think it is more like an extra set of teeth because we used to eat much rougher diets and bones (and stuff) that wore out our teeth so the wisdom set could fill in for them.

I sort of agree with Nagare on this one. Dentition has a lot to do with the classification system of primates (You know, Three-Two-One-Two haha!). It probably affects other areas of classification, but I do not study that, so I would not really know for sure. Anyway, it is an evolutionary trait for us.

A lot of other organism who have diets which limit them to eating plants and fruits often have extra molars appear later on. If an animal cannot chew its food, then it will not be properly digested. Thus they die. You see this happen to elephants, cows, etc sometimes.

Humans are omnivores, so it has become less of a necessity for us to need these teeth. But a lot of anthropologists believe our more primative relatives once had less of a meaty diet and more of a plant-like diet. I do not think we were every insectivores, but we certainly ate a lot of vegetation. Whenever humans started having dogs around them would probably be whenever meat became a larger part of our diet. That would make the most sense. Humans do not have a lot of buttressing in their jaws, so our diets could not have been that heavy and rough, right? *looks at post* I ramble, sorry. Heh.

	god -  4827 pts -  (3 years ago)
	dogs evolved because of wolves following the destruction of meat left behind men. Without humans dogs would have never existed.

we used to loose teeth, these would come in to push the others into place around the gap or to give us one more tooth to make sure our lack of teeth didn't kill us as quickly.

Wisdom teeth used to have a purpose; I forget what it was right now. However, they serve very little purpose now, and as we speak, the human race is evolving outside of the growth of wisdom teeth.