The world’s first dentist was a Neanderthal, according to a recent study.
59,000 years ago in what’s now southwestern Siberia, a Neanderthal had a toothache. It must have been a doozy because they were desperate enough to sit still while someone drilled into the tooth with a sharp stone tool, removing the infected tissue and ultimately relieving the pain.
The process left behind a hole in the tooth that paleoanthropologist Alisa Zubova of the Russian Academy of Sciences and her colleagues recognized, tens of millennia later, as dental work. Archaeologists unearthed the tooth at Chagyrskaya Cave in Russia, and it’s now the oldest known evidence of dentistry—or any direct medical treatment.
To test whether the hole was made intentionally, Zubova and her colleagues examined the tooth more closely with scanning electron microscopes, micro-CT, and Raman spectroscopy, a technique for identifying the chemical makeup of an object. They also made their own stone drilll or perforator (a sharp stone tool that would have been used to drill or punch holes in hides, bone, and other materials) and tested it on three human teeth.
Two of the teeth were museum specimens, whose age and context curators didn’t know, making them less useful for other kinds of research. But one, an upper left third molar with an untreated cavity, came straight from the mouth of one of the authors—for science!
(In most scientific papers, a section at the end outlines the specific contributions of each author, which usually means tasks like writing, data collection, production of stone tools, and analysis. This paper’s author contributions did not list “donation of a tooth for experimental archaeology,” so we can only speculate about who bit the proverbial bullet.)
The holes and striations left behind by Zubova and her colleagues’ experiments very closely matched what they saw on the molar from Chagyrskaya, which means it’s very likely that the 59,000-year-old tooth was, in fact, the aftermath of an actual Paleolithic medical procedure.
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