A dental filling that lasted 6,500 years

ANCIENT dentistry has been discovered in a 6,500-
year-old human jawbone: a lump of beeswax that
appears to be the earliest evidence of a dental filling.
The beeswax was probably applied to ease
pain from a crack in the enamel and dentin layers of
the tooth, said Claudio Tuniz, a nuclear paleoanthropologist
at the Abdus Salam International Center
for Theoretical Physics in Italy.
He and his colleagues report their findings in
the journal PLoS One.
The jawbone was discovered in 1911, embedded
in a rock inside a cave in what is now Slovenia.
For many years it was left unstudied in the Museum
of Natural History in Trieste, Italy.
With radiocarbon analysis, the researchers determined
that both the tooth and the beeswax were
6,500 years old.
The Neolithic people that lived in the area at
the time were primarily involved in breeding
sheep, Federico Bernardini, an archaeologist at
the centresaid.
They probably used their teeth as “a third
hand,” he said—a tool to hold thread when weaving,
for instance. Evidence of prehistoric dentistry is
rare, but it exists. Tooth drilling, for instance, is
known to have occurred in what is now Pakistan
more than 7,500 years ago.