How Did Ancient Humans Fix Their Teeth?

Nine thousand years ago, someone drilled a hole into a living person's tooth. The patient survived, and it happened again and again for fifteen hundred years in the same village.

For most of human history, people barely got cavities. Then farming arrived — bread, soft starchy food, sugar sitting on teeth all day — and human mouths started falling apart. The first dentists appeared because agriculture had just created the first patients.

Archaeologists found eleven drilled molars in a Neolithic graveyard in Pakistan. The tool was almost certainly a bow drill, and the people using it were probably not healers but bead makers, whose hands were already trained to bore small clean holes.

Even older evidence exists. A 13,000-year-old tooth from northern Italy was scraped out and sealed with tar. A 6,500-year-old jaw from Slovenia had a cracked tooth filled with beeswax.

What ancient humans could not do was explain why teeth rot. They blamed a worm — an idea that appeared independently in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China and Central America, and survived in Europe until the 1700s. Treatment followed the belief: smoke it out, poison it, pull the tooth.

The drill arrived about nine thousand years before the correct explanation did.


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