Dental News - Stone-age dental filling identified

Robert Selleck, DTA

Tue. 9 October 2012

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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., USA: A team of Italian and Australian researches appears to have found physical proof that restorative dentistry dates to the Stone Age. The researchers identified traces of a dental filling made of beeswax in a Neolithic human tooth discovered in Slovenia, and they are saying it may be the “earliest known direct evidence of [a] therapeutic-palliative dental filling.”

The research findings were published Sept. 19 in PLoS ONE, the peer-reviewed, open-access journal, accessible at www.plosone.org.

The team acknowledges in its paper that it cannot be absolutely certain that the beeswax filling was placed in the tooth in an effort to address a dental problem the individual was experiencing while alive. But the paper identifies that as being the most likely of the possible scenarios that would explain the presence of the substance on a worn-down tooth that otherwise would have had exposed dentin.

“The tooth probably became very sensitive, limiting the functionality of the jaw during occlusion. The occlusal surface could have been filled with beeswax in an attempt to reduce the pain [by] sealing exposed dentin tubules and the fracture from changes in osmotic pressure (as occurs on contact with sugar) and temperature (hot or cold relative to the oral cavity),” the team wrote.

The piece of jawbone with five teeth still attached was discovered long before the team’s research was conducted. It was excavated from a cave wall near the village of Loche, Istria, in Slovenia and was initially dated based on associated fauna remains, which traced to the Upper Pleistocene era.

The team reported that the specimen was considered to be “one of the most ancient anthropological remains from the northern-Adriatic area.” But the find had never been subjected to detailed analysis until the researchers secured permission to study the mandible using state-of-the-art scanning technology and radiocarbon dating techniques.

Permission was granted by Italy’s Natural History Museum of Trieste, to whom the original finders had donated the specimen. The mandible, determined to be from a male who died in his 20s, was described by the team as, “the left portion of an isolated adult mandible bearing a canine, two premolars, and the first two molars.”

The 12-person team of researchers from university and governmental facilities in Italy and Australia used synchrotron radiation computed microtomography, accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating, infrared spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy to separately analyze the tooth, bone and filling material.

Based on the radiocarbon analysis, the mandible was dated to an age range of 6,655–6,400 years Before Present and the filling 6,645–6,440 years BP.

The researchers listed several previously known examples of ancient dentistry but said there was no known published documentation of the use of “therapeutic palliative substance in prehistoric dentistry.” The research team also referenced documentation on the use of beeswax as a binding agent in antiquity -— and explained the substance’s ability to remain preserved for long periods of time because of its “extreme chemical stability.”

The team's conclusion: “In this emerging framework of ancient dental therapeutic practices, the finding of a human partial mandible associated with contemporary beeswax, covering the occlusal surface of a canine, could represent a possible case of therapeutic use of beeswax during the Neolithic.”

In a note regarding the funding of the research project, the team wrote, “This work is part of the ICTP/Elettra EXACT Project (Elemental X-ray Analysis and Computed Tomography) funded by Friuli Venezia Giulia (Italy). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

The team’s paper is titled, “Beeswax as Dental Filling on a Neolithic Human Tooth.”

(Source: Plos One, www.plosone.org, Sept. 19, 2012, Vol. 7, Issue 9 e44904)

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