The Origins of Dentistry

Posted on April 6, 2006 in Dentition Fact-Dropping

I’ve always been of the opinion that demons invented dentistry and then, plying processed sugar, made us believe that we couldn’t live without it. Recent discoveries in Pakistan, however, have pointed to a more human origin of the whirling and burring art.

The findings, which appear in the journal Nature, push back the dawn of dentistry by 4,000 years. The drilled molars, 11 in all, come from a sample of 300 individuals buried in graves at the Mehrgarh site in western Pakistan, believed to be the oldest Stone Age complex in the Indus River valley.

“This is certainly the first case of drilling a person’s teeth,” said David W. Frayer, a professor at the University of Kansas who is the lead author. “But even more significant, this practice lasted some 1,500 years and was a tradition at this site. It wasn’t just a sporadic event.”

I always thought there was something Stone Age about hygienic tooth battery. I like my dentists and their assistants well enough, but the sound of a drill, the taste of powdered enamel, and the glint of statinless steel everything wears me down to a strapped-down starfish, clinging to the chair for dear life because they won’t let him run away. The mere preparation of a tooth for a filling is a barbaric ritual that we now know to have its origins well before the time of dental floss, sonic toothbrushes, and detail men.

I suppose that then as now dentists were well-paid medical mechanics who people feared, shamans who ground open the surface of the tooth and released microscopic demons for a fee.

New Agers might seek comfort in the knowledge that ancient cultures drew upon spirit forces to heal the enamel. More realistic modernists such as myself would say Ouch is ouch.

And I prefer high speed stainless steel to slow-moving flint, thank you.

It seems that then, as now, diet brought about dental plagues:

Roberto Macchiarelli, a professor of paleoanthropology at the University of Poitiers, France, and the report’s lead anthropological researcher, attributed the bad teeth to the Neolithic diet, which included newly domesticated wheat and barley.

“A lot of abrasive mineral material was introduced when grains were ground on a stone,” he said. “And as these people moved to a grain diet, their teeth wore down, dentin was exposed and the risk of infection rose.”

In other words, these people were chewing on rocks? Oy vey!

I’ll brush! I’ll brush! And avoid stone ground anything.

Photo copyright 2004 by Joel Sax