Bees wax as dental filling
There is not a lot of evidence of dental care in prehistory. This evidence belongs to the period of the Early Neolithic. Researchers in Slovenia found a jaw with a “filled” tooth, approximately 6,500 years old. The crown of the left canine contains traces of bees wax filling.
Researchers found an ancient cracked tooth repaired with a filling made of beeswax. Probably it was the beginning of therapeutic dentistry.
The tooth is 65 centuries old and was part of a man’s jaw found more than 100 years ago in Slovenia.
Definite evidence of ancient dentistry is rare. The oldest examples are 7,500 to 9,500 year old molars found in Pakistan. These had regular shaped cavities with concentric ridges drilled into them.
Other, more questionable finds include a 5,500-year-old artificial tooth from Egypt.
Scientists reported online today (Sept. 19) in the journal PLoS ONE that they found the filling as they analyzed a 6,500-year-old lower jaw recovered from a cave near Trieste, Italy.
The jaw belonged to a young man, between 24 and 30 years old. The piece included a left canine tooth possessing a vertical crack in its hard enamel and softer dentin layers.
The severe wear and tear seen on the tooth were probably due to activities besides eating. The researchers said, for example men of the time might have used their teeth to soften leather or help make tools. On other hand, the women bit down on threads to hold them while wove.
The researchers found beeswax had been applied to the left canine at about the time of the man’s death.
“It was extremely difficult for somebody to identify the dentistry work by the naked eye” told the researcher Claudio Tuniz. Tuniz is a nuclear paleoanthropologist at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Italy.
The lower jaw had remained at the international center “for 101 years without somebody noticing anything strange on the canine,” Tuniz said.
The researchers managed to figure out the age of the bees wax using a large ion accelerator, which let them see what carbon isotopes were in the wax.
All isotopes of carbon have six protons but differ in the number of neutrons they possess.
The carbon-14 isotope is unstable and decays over time. So analyzing the ratio of carbon-14 to other carbon isotopes can shed light on how much time has passed.
The researchers also used X-rays from another powerful particle accelerator to get a 3D picture of the tooth with a resolution of about one-thousandth of a millimeter.
They could not confirm whether this filling was made shortly before or after the person’s death.
This finding is perhaps the most ancient evidence of prehistoric dentistry in Europe,” said the archaeologist Federico Bernardini in a statement.
It may be the oldest direct example of a therapeutic dental filling uncovered to date, Bernardini added.
