Earliest known evidence of dental treatment shows that Neanderthals used stone drills to treat cavities 59,000 years ago.
As reported by The Guardian, the molar was unearthed in a cave in southern Siberia and features a deep hole that appears to have been created using a sharp, thin stone tool whilst the tooth’s owner was alive.
Archaeologists say that the discovery provides insights into Neanderthals’ advanced behaviours, and ability to endure what would have been an excruciating procedure for the greater good.
Archaeologist, Dr Kseniya Kolobovo, comments: “This discovery powerfully reinforces the now well-supported view that Neanderthals were not the brutish, inferior cousins of outdated stereotypes but a sophisticated human population with complex cognitive and cultural capacities. [It] adds an entirely new dimension – invasive medical treatment – to the growing list of advanced Neanderthal behaviours.”
This predates the earliest example of dental drilling by Homo sapiens by more than 40,000 years. The edges of the drilled cavity are smooth, and the wear patterns inside suggest that the individual lived and continued to chew using the tooth after the treatment.
Based on experiments with three modern human teeth, researchers estimate that penetrating the dentine using a narrow tool made of local jasper between two fingers would have taken between 35 and 50 minutes of solid work.
Justin Durham, a professor of orofacial pain at Newcastle University, described this as “the beginnings of a root canal treatment”, which would have relieved pain in the short term.
“The tooth is a closed box. So the pressure [that builds up during an infection] is what causes the intense, painful, pounding, pulsing toothache that people are familiar with,” he said. “If you put a big hole in the tooth like this Neanderthal dentist did, it would relieve that pressure.”
“We have to use diamond-tipped burrs running at greater than 40,000 revolutions a minute to get through the outer surface of the tooth in modern-day dentistry,” Durham added. “So this is quite a phenomenal achievement, which is why I take my hat off to the Neanderthal who did it. It really does demonstrate high-level thinking and high-level skills as far as I’m concerned.”
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Main image credit: Unsplash
