Neanderthal Toothpick Marks Show They Had Primitive Dental Care

Neanderthal Toothpick Marks Show They Had Primitive Dental Care




Steven Luntz
28/06/2017


Grooves have been found on 130,000-year-old Neanderthal teeth that appear to indicate the use of toothpicks, and impacted or rotated teeth got extra attention. The discovery adds to an abundance of recent evidence showing how advanced early humans were – far from the grunting half-apes we saw them as not long ago.

A cave in Krapina, Croatia, has made important contributions to our understanding of Neanderthals since bones and teeth were discovered there between 1899 and 1905. Recent reexamination of items extracted from the cave by Professor David Frayer of the University of Kansas and Dr Davorka Radovčić of the Croatian Natural History Museum has revealed much that was missed by previous generations of anthropologists.

Frayer and Radovčić studied four Neanderthal teeth under a microscope, picking up signs of grooves consistent with the use of toothpicks, along with what dentists call occlusal wear, the loss of material from teeth rubbing against each other.

In the Bulletin of the International Association for Paleodontology (yes seriously, that is a twice-yearly journal) the pair report that previous studies on the same teeth identified where in the mouth they came from. All four had toothpick grooves, but these were much deeper on an M3 molar and premolar. Those teeth also showed signs of abnormality, with the premolar rotated and the M3 partially impacted.

More:
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/neanderthal-toothpick-marks-show-they-had-primitive-dental-care/