The 8000 year old Root Canal

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Look Ma, no painkillers . . . AAARGH!

Yeeowww! Prehistoric Dentists Used Stone Drills
By Ker Than
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 05 April 2006
01:00 pm ET

If you dread going to the dentist, be thankful you didn't live in the Stone Age.

Roughly 8,000 years before Novocaine and some 7,300 years before they could even swig whiskey to dull the pain, prehistoric patients were having holes drilled into their teeth with drill bits carved from stone.

Scientists found 11 teeth from the skeletons of four females, two males and three individuals of unknown gender in an ancient cemetery in Pakistan that show signs of having undergone the painful procedure.

Life after pain

All the teeth had worn a bit after the holes were made, confirming that the drillings were performed while the people were still alive.

It's unlikely the holes were drilled for decorative purposes since all of teeth were first or second permanent molars located deep inside the mouth, said study leader Roberto Macchiarelli from the Universite de Poitiers in France.

The researchers think the dental work may have been done to ease pain, since four of the teeth showed signs of decay and the jaw of at least one individual showed signs of massive infection. One poor soul had three drilled teeth and another had a tooth that had been drilled twice.

The procedure would have caused a lot of pain, too. The holes ranged from about 1 to 3 millimeters in diameter and were about 0.5 to 3.5 millimeters deep.

One minute of torture

The researchers reconstructed a flint-tipped drill and found they could create similar holes in less than a minute.

But even with anesthetic, it would likely have been a very long one minute, Macchiarelli said.

"The extent and depth of the drilling would have produced horrible pain," he told LiveScience. "These people took the capability of facing pain to another level."

At the excavation site, flint drill heads were found alongside beads made of bone, shell, turquoise and other material. The researchers think the early dentists learned their craft from artisans skilled at making beads.

The findings are detailed in the April 6 issue of the journal Nature

[The Nomad]

Awesome. Now I know that my future profession is over 8,000 years old ! That just freakin' kicks ass.

[Spetulhu]

Pain? Stoneage peoples performed trepanations without anesthesia too.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Pain? Stoneage peoples performed trepanations without anesthesia too.

While this is true, I suspect that people who were in need of Stone Age trepannations usually had the benefit of being unconscious.

[LongVin]

Pain? Stoneage peoples performed trepanations without anesthesia too.

Whats a Trepanation?


And damn that root canal surgery had hurt espicially with the "drills" they had back then. I had two cavities filled once without anesthics and damn that hurt they had to drill for awhile because the cavity was deep I can only cringe when thinking about a root canal without anesthics.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Pain? Stoneage peoples performed trepanations without anesthesia too.

Whats a Trepanation?


And damn that root canal surgery had hurt espicially with the "drills" they had back then. I had two cavities filled once without anesthics and damn that hurt they had to drill for awhile because the cavity was deep I can only cringe when thinking about a root canal without anesthics.

A trepanation is a type of surgery which involves drilling a hole in the skull, but not one that is so deep that the membrane covering the brain, or the brain itself are cut into. In many of the Stone Age cases, it looks like trepanations were performed on patients who had suffered some sort of severe head-trauma . . . which is who we perform them on today. Even more astonishingly, the survival rate for the stone age version of the surgery was something like 80%.

[Imperial Overlord]

On the subject of pian, poppy extract (opium and its family) is one of the oldest trade goods.