The earliest tooth drilling
AI-drafted · awaiting admin review
Were people in the Indian subcontinent drilling teeth 9,000 years ago, thousands of years before anyone else?
India first (well documented)Medicine & health
Indian claim
At Mehrgarh, a Neolithic site in Balochistan in the north-west of the subcontinent (now in Pakistan), people's molar teeth were drilled while they were alive, between about 9,000 and 7,500 years ago.
Evidence for the Indian claim
- A team including Andrea Coppa, Roberto Macchiarelli and David Frayer reported in Nature in April 2006 eleven drilled molar crowns from nine adults at Mehrgarh.
- The holes show smooth edges from wear, proving the people lived on after the drilling. Researchers think bow-driven flint drills were used, and the practice lasted about 1,500 years.
Commonly credited to
Simpler dental treatment is older elsewhere: a tooth from Villabruna in Italy, about 14,000 years old, shows a cavity scraped out with a flint tool.
Evidence for the other claim
- The Italian find is scraping, not drilling, so it is earlier dental care but not earlier drilling. The Mehrgarh drilling remains the oldest known drilling of living teeth.
What historians and scientists say
The oldest known evidence of tooth drilling in living people comes from Mehrgarh in the Indian subcontinent, a documented first of the region's early farming communities. Simpler cavity scraping is known earlier from Upper Palaeolithic Italy.