Somebody Was Drilling Teeth 9,000 Years Ago

The wheel is about 5,500 years old.

Drilled teeth are about 9,000 years old.

People were drilling holes in each other’s molars three thousand years before anyone worked out how to roll something.

Mehrgarh

At a Neolithic site in what is now Pakistan, archaeologists found eleven drilled molars from nine different adults, buried between roughly 7,500 and 9,000 years ago. Neat conical holes, going into the chewing surface, some of them right into the sensitive part of the tooth.

The tool was a bow drill with a flint tip. We know because the same community was making stone beads with the same technique, and the marks in the enamel match the marks in the beads. Somebody looked at the drill they used for jewelry and thought: that would work on a tooth.

The detail that stops people is this. The drilled surfaces are worn. Chewing wear, laid down after the hole was made — which means those teeth kept working for years. These weren’t corpses being modified for burial. They were patients, and they walked away.

There was no anesthetic. There wouldn’t be for another nine thousand years.

Then somebody invented the filling

Six and a half thousand years ago, in what is now Slovenia, a person cracked a canine tooth vertically — the kind of crack that exposes dentin and makes the tooth scream at anything cold.

The tooth was found with beeswax packed into the crack, applied at around the time of death. It’s the oldest known dental filling in the world, and the reasoning behind it is identical to modern reasoning: seal the exposed surface, stop the pain.

Wax was a sensible choice, too. It’s moldable at body temperature, sticks to a dry surface and it’s inert.

And it goes back further still

In northern Italy, a set of teeth around 13,000 years old show something even earlier: the decayed material inside the cavities had been scraped out with tiny stone tools, and there are traces of bitumen — natural tar — in the hollows.

Same idea again. Remove the rot, plug the hole. Thirteen thousand years ago, in the Ice Age, before farming, before pottery, before anything.

Why teeth, of all things

Almost every other ancient injury was left alone. Broken bones set themselves crooked. Wounds got a poultice. Nobody was performing surgery.

But toothache is different, and everybody who has had one knows why. It is the one pain you cannot lie down and wait out. It doesn’t ease when you rest, it gets worse at night, it stops you eating and it stops you sleeping, and it can go on for months.

So the first surgery humans invented wasn’t for the most dangerous problem. It was for the most unbearable one.

The short version

Before the wheel, before writing, before the plow, somebody sat still while another person put a spinning flint into their molar.

And then they got up and kept using the tooth.