Slashdot Mirror
Stone Age Dentists
morleron writes "Scientists have found evidence in Pakistan that the Stone Age had dentists. They used flint drills to remove cavities and attempt other tooth repair. No evidence as to whether or not the patients were conscious during the procedures."
In other news, ancient people from Bedrock had cars, which they powered with their feet. Scientists have located stone cylinders next to sticks, which can only have one possible meaning. No evidence as to whether or not this is really the case. NOTE: This is a joke. Plain and simple. The article is actually pretty cool.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
No evidence as to whether or not the patients were conscious during the procedures
During the "Stone" Age, I think it's obvious that even the patients were conscious, they weren't be soon after the procedures started.
I'm more interested in knowing if the patients were still alive after the procedures.
Got Game/Music/Movie? In NZ? Swap Them Here
Ooops... looks like I beat you, Mr. Troll
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
I dont think I want to know what kind of anesthesia they would have used then...
they didn't use novocaine, they used NovoClub
NovoClub: Only one swing and the pain goes away!
i'm sure that they are not called as 'dentists'.
what are you, an anti-dentite?
One of us would have to be unconscious during that procedure. If it wasn't me, the dentist would have been long dead before he got eaten by a wooly mammoth.
I'm thinking their dentistry ran along the lines of:
It hurts, rip it out with whatever method you can.
They still recommended you see them twice a year though...
This is what happens when you have your spouse do dental work on you.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
Probably not as bad as you'd think. Hemp, opium, datura, henbane, mandrake and hemlock were all known to be used as prehistoric anaesthetics. Dwale, an anaesthetic used in old England, was a reasonably sophisticated mixture of bile, lettuce, vinegar, bryony root, hemlock, opium, and henbane.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
samzenpus from the old-drilling dept.
Try the old Slashdot story department maybe?
It's alright, us Slashdot readers understand. After having your teeth drilled without Novacaine it's understandable that you're suffering from memory loss or blocking out the trauma as previously reported.
I wanna make a bow drill now.
Oh You POS
Opium, or ethanol, perhaps?
"... Hemp, opium..."
Dude, that so totally makes sense. It was the Stone Age, so they were, like, stoned...
...to underestimate ancient people, maybe even necessary in order to gain a better appreciation of human nature, but it's heartening to know that we only underestimate ourselves. Now to master nano-age dentistry...
Any dentists here?
If the tooth bone (pulp or whatever the stuff below the enamel is) is exposed, wouldn't it start to rot in no time?
If yes and the further decay is limited (4 teeth showed decay associated with the hole), would that suggestion that they filled the hole with clay, resin, or some other material capable of hardening?
Bert
Codeine, a powerful pain reliever is a constituent of Opium. Opium has been known to be used by Neanderthals roughly 40,000 years ago and it's effects were well known in Ancient Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Considering that this is Pakistan, I would imagine that they had supplies of Opium nearby.
They weren't exactly grunting fools 8,000-10,000 years ago.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
I would have just asked "What?" myself.
I have freaks! I did something right...
'I tell you, Barney, I don't need to see no dentist! I can do this myself...' 'But Fred...' 'Look, I've tied one end of this rope to my tooth, the other end to a boulder. Then I just push it over this cliff and... yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!' 'Fred? Hey, where'd you go, Fred?' *voice from bottom of cliff* 'Call the dentist, Barn.'
Toothpain? No problem...Captain Caveman fix you good
Captain Caveman apply anesthetics so you dont feel pain (SLAM!)
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
and this is how dentistry is still done there!
Why has there been such a precedent lately to post old news?
http://chickencamels.poemofquotes.com/
"They weren't exactly grunting fools 8,000-10,000 years ago."
perhaps not, but we are now. And now
I love humanity, it is people I hate
They weren't exactly grunting fools 8,000-10,000 years ago.
So the human race has de-evolved then?
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
Eh, let us not wildly exaggerate the pain involved. My father had all his fillings as a child without anaesthesia. It isn't unheard of for people to refuse it today.
What I find more curious about this report is that the ancient men were observant enough to realize that if you stopped the decay by drilling it out, you needn't lose the tooth later. As late as the 18th century or so, I believe the standard treatment for a decaying tooth was: (1) wait until it really starts to hurt, and then (2) pull it out. Drilling the decay out (while preserving the tooth) is a lot more sophisticated.
This is the same time period in which agriculture/civilization first developed, which also led to a decline in diet [too much starch] and a lower quality of life [state oppression].
Well it sounds like dental technology hasn't changed. My dentist is a bastard from hell, a flint drill would be better than that little whining lightning rod. And I'll bet the ancient Pakistani's let you get properly smashed on fermented goats milk before they took the drill to you. None of this "Injection in the mouth" bullshit.
The team that carried out the work say close examination of the teeth shows the tool was "surprisingly effective" at removing rotting dental tissue.
Surprisingly effective compared to what? The Tom Hanks method of dentistry?
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
They weren't exactly grunting fools 8,000-10,000 years ago.
Are you suggesting that they were smarter than most of us?
Whoa.
Go ahead, mod me offtopic.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
They used flint drills to remove cavities
Em, a cavity is a hole, so can someone tell me how you remove a hole with a drill?
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
i read in another article, and in thinking about it would probably also be my conclusion, that the motivation was likely not to remove abscessed parts of the tooth, but to provide a means by which evil spirits or whatever could escape.
As I had a spate of dental problems the last year and because I was wondering why we evolves such apparently wretchedly fragile teeth (sharks have it nice, three rows of ever-emerging teeth keep popping up and the old ones pop out), and read up on dentistry in general to take better care of my teeth.
There are a lot of people out there who keep repeating that cavities were not a problem in most people until refined sugar hit the scene around the 1700s and that the industrial revolution made it cheap for the masses.
This is true to a point but I guess this article shows it's stupid to think that no one had cavities before refined sugar.
Drspiller.com being a good site to look up some info. Meat won't give cavities. Natural starchy foods (vegetables like potatoes) and fruit have many natural fibers that wash their own sugars off your teeth before they have time to settle, and the acids in them negligent because of dilution. With a drink of water afterwards should prevent any problems.
So it's true, processed and refined foods, especially with sugar, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, etcetera, are the biggest causes of cavities.
However, dried fruits are sticky and should be treated as refined sugar or processed foods (these all can cause cavities) and may be the biggest cavity causer of the old world (along with perhaps alcohols, like mead, etcetera).
hemlock
Dearie dearie me, I'd read that olde booke of herbales again if I was you, anyone munching on sprig of hemlock will indeed feel nothing while you operate on them. Or ever again. We have to strip field of the stuff here to stop it killing the cows.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Stone age dentistry happens even today... a little more updated, but not too much, for most of the billions on this planet.
"Where There Is No Dentist"
cheers
front
I don't know; I don't see a lot of advanced technology in today's dentistry. They have instruments with finer precision, sure, and they have fillings that last longer, but essentially, they're just plugging holes for the most part, which has always been possible with a bit of tree resin. Essentially, dentistry is a major contrast to other medical professions, because it has made little progress towards prevention or CURES for decay, besides physical stuff like toothpaste and floss.
Lately, there was a slashdot story about changing the electrical properties of teeth so that plaque can't attach. In sci-fi, there are ideas like hermetically sealing teeth. I really think dentistry should be working much harder towards things like that.
Prior, you have a normal cavity. It might have a small opening in the top of a molar. The small opening could lead down to something much bigger. The inside is impossible to clean.
Afterward, you have a great big hole. You'd at least have some hope of keeping it kind of clean so that things don't get much worse.
For more on your point, see:4 49219-7760050?v=glance&n=283155
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
and:
"CLAWS: Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery"
http://www.whywork.org/
"If you start asking yourself "why work?" you may see a connection between wage slavery, misunderstandings of leisure, lifestyles based on consumption, corporate welfare, education that often amounts to little more than conditioning, and the global social, environmental, and economic crises we are now facing. We hope that the materials we feature here will encourage critical thinking about such things. This site is primarily about ideas and encouragement, so our focus is more philosophical than practical. However, ideas and action go hand-in-hand, so we're currently expanding the "practicality" sections."
and:
"THE ABOLITION OF WORK" by Bob Black
http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists--except that I'm not kidding--I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work--and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs--they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."
or:
_The End of Work_
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0874778247/002-6
"Global unemployment is now at its highest levels since the Great Depression. Rifkin (Biosphere Politics, LJ 5/15/91) argues that the Information Age is the third great Industrial Revolution. A consequence of these technological advances is the rapid decline in employment and purchasing power that could lead to a worldwide economic collapse. Rifkin foresees two possible outcomes: a near workerless world in which people are free, for the first time in history, to pursue a utopian life of leisure; or a world in which unemployment leads to an even further polarization of the economic classes and a decline in living conditions for millions of people."
James P. Hogan has several sci-fi novels envisioning an alternative positive future (e.g. _Voyage from Yesteryear_)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
In most cases, the dosage makes the poison. See drugs (legal and illegal). Re hemlock, look here, for example.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
If humans in then stone-age were aware of how to handle toothdecay in such detail. (not just knocking out the affected teeth, but drilling) how come in the mideavil ages humans seemed to have reached a deep low? (I thought the French used anise to cover the smell of their rotting teeth and themselves)
The more scientists discover about humans in the stone-age, the more they appear to be very peaceful and more develloped as priorly portraited.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
*shrug* there's this assumption that people before the Enlightenment were stupid, but 'tain't so. Galen performed brain surgery. So did ancient Egyptians. People are very very good at figuring out the medicinal properties of herbs, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were some moderately effective anaesthesia they used.
All's true that is mistrusted
...I think it's the large round rock with no sharp edges, on the tray behind the flint drills and chisels.
I tend to think they only removed teeth, what kind of amalgam could they have used?
Braces would be out of the question, although other deliberate deformation probably wasn't unheard of at the time. OTOH, like some se asian and african tribes (and probably others) used to do, they may have just sharpened their teeth to a point.
Read Plato's Phaedo (Hackforth's translation is pretty good, and the translator's name oddly appropriate for the Slashdot crowd), which recounts the death of Socrates and where the executioner discusses his art in a disconcertingly cheerful fashion. Hemlock had to be downed once in a large quantity for it to kill, taking smaller doses would just cause numbness throughout the body.
Books from Roman times show that complicated operations were routine, but the scale of dentistry has its own particular challenges. Making a thick drill from flint may be easy, but to make a fine dental drill that won't break before the tooth could be a real challenge.
In the past 9000 years, the only real advancement in dentistry appears to be the addition of fillings to the procedure. Otherwise, going to the dentist is still pretty much like having a neolithic barbarian bang on your teeth with rocks.
As someone a) currently w/o dental insurance and b) with a cavity starting (I can feel that bugger) I appreciate the link.
Anyone got any pliers? :wince:
Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.
Yeah, but I want to know two things:
First, did they save a lot of money on their car insurance by switching to GEICO?
Secondly, did they really favor roast duck with a mango salsa?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
You can go to the Qandahari Bazaar of Quetta today, and you'll see dentists lined up on the footpath fixing peoples teeth. There are cars and rickshaws blaring away a few feet away from them. Dentists themselves are stocky muscular dudes in the same traditional dress, shoes taken off sitting on the cloth mat and sometimes with a made-in-china loupe holding boiled metal tools that they sharpen using knife sharpeners or simply ceramic bricks.
They obtain their tools from the organic waste of hospitals of Karachi which are sold on trolleys in the bazaars there. You see thousands of scalpels and the likes lined up under the sun sold for Rs 5 (10c) or less even to the grand public. Get up real close and in the crevices of the handle you'll notice dried up blood.
But the dentists DO boil their tools sometimes before your eyes on gas cookers, on the footpath. You'll occasionally hear a moan where a tooth is getting right out... real men dont need anasthetic.
With my full dental insurance here in Toronto, I still am put on long holds, have to fill out way more paperwork, and in the end, its still an italian surgeon who remarkably resembles the Qandahari Bazaar surgeons complete with hairy forearms, who pulls the teeth. Even the tools look the same. So stop pretending we've advanced that much!
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
...as scientificaly demonstrated by Tom Hanks in Cast Away with an ice-skate blade and a rock!
That scene still gives me the heebie jeebies just remembering it!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Considering that this is Pakistan, I would imagine that they had supplies of Opium nearby
Nope, sorry, but the opium poppy is an introduced species in Pakistan. Alexander gets the credit for the introduction, circa 327 BC, from "Ancient Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia".
It's a plant native to the Mediterranian basin.
The first record of opium being used medicinally in India (remember that Pakistan did not exist until the last half of the 20th century) occurs circa 1200 AD and recreational use of sufficient quantity to be notable did not begin until circa 1600, "coincident" with:
Massive cultivation of opium in India did not begin until the Portuguese, followed by the Dutch and English, began exporting it from India to China. It was the Dutch who taught the Chinese to smoke it, circa 1700.
Opium in Asia is one of the earliest byproducts of Eurpean "colonization" of the Orient. It was entirely unknown there before the Iron Age.
KFG
considering that susrutha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susrutha was from a couple millennia ago atleast.. i wouldnt be surprised if they were well advanced a few millennia before his time as well. Among the best of the world's universities were in that region [ Taxsila] for thousands of years.
The possible meanings are dependent upon how old the author is. Is the author thousands of years old?
You joke, but I do recall a few years back when it was discovered that prehistoric man did brain surgery using stone tools. They found the tools and skulls with healed repairs. A quick googling returns http://www.brain-surgery.com/history.html -- maybe somebody can cite better sites.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Oog, the Open Source Caveman -- he could give us a first-hand account of the procedure.
In the Stone Age, at the dawn of human civilization, primitive dentists were forced to use physical drills to grind away tooth decay. This barbaric practice was undoubtedly painful for the patient, who may have had nothing but a local anaesthetic to help them through the procedure.
(Implied wink)
But seriously, screw the flying cars, screw the house-cleaning robots... where's my pain-free dentistry? Shouldn't we have something better than drills and shots by now?
(And yes, I'm terrified of dentists and way overdue for a visit.)
They were no smarter or dumber than us, in fact "they" are "us".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
But he never inhaled.
617B3B7F7E7C7D7F00EOF
I have evidence that partially hardened pine resin,
compressed and packed with nearby teeth, could provide a
durable (but probably not permanent) filling for the hole.
As a child, my brother had to have a piece of this resin
removed by a dentist, after our feeble caveman attempts
to remove it failed. We had been trying something our
grandmother had told us, that you could create a stiff
chewing gum out of a lump of hardenened pinyon resin
plucked from the tree. You can!
It turns out that some technique is involved, and my
brother failed that test, and had an impacted chunk of
compressed resin stuck in his teeth.
Codeine, a powerful pain reliever is a constituent of Opium
Codeine is actually a rather weak pain reliever. It's also a rather minor component of opium. The main active alkaloid is morphine. Codeine is just
methyl-morphine, and is demethylated in the body to morphine and has identical
pharmacology.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The flint drills could carve holes just as good as a modern dental instrument in less than a minute. That's an awful lot faster than modern procedures. Although technology (x-rays, etc) have undoubtably improved in some respects, it seems evident that other aspects of modern dentistry are essentially unchanged from this primitive form, or perhaps even less sophisticated in some cases.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There is one part that intrigues me more than all of this put together, though. Flint is not a strong material. It can be made into an edge very easily by striking it at the right angle and knapping it into shape. But those edges will only be any good for cutting. I have seen NOTHING in any of the articles which explains how you would knapp a flint into a rotatable cutting edge, needed for a drill. Flint breaks into a pair of concave/convex shapes, you can't make any kind of corkscrew shape or uniformly rounded point. You could make an edge that looked like the top of a Phillip's screwdriver, but that's about it, and my guess it would be too fragile to cut through something as hard as a tooth.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Sugar? But why didn't God improve our body design to handle junk food? Don't tell me he sits around waiting for natural selection to do it. That would take too long.
Table-ized A.I.
For a second I read Netherlands insstead of Neanderthals - and thought "Wow, they had
pot 40,000 years ago too?"
The sad part is, NovaClub never actually went into production; its patent is owned by NeoLith industries, a well-known patent troll.
That's my question.
In my lifetime, dentists have changed the way you're supposed to brush your teeth three times now.
This isn't rocket science, folks. Try to find a way to get plague off someone's teeth without using C-4, please.
I suspect dentistry simply isn't trying to solve the problem of tooth decay - there's too much money in not solving it. By now, we should have a simple chemical that spread on the teeth should remove bacteria and plaque almost instantly and prevent further growth. It's ridiculous.
I guess I'll have to wait for further development of nanotech - I just hope I have any teeth left by then (OTOH, I'll probably be able to rebuild them with nanotech, anyway.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
We need the C-4 to get plaque (calculus) off your teeth because it IS that bad. How many times do you hear people/ads/TV/etc telling you to brush and floss in a day? In one ear, out the other, apparently
He would have had lots of problems using flint.
... because of this it has a good cutting edge that leaves a clean cut that heals easily, but for drilling it's totaly inapropriate. In UK it was used in surgery until the XXth century (there were a couple of workshops that made flint blades for scalpels), but if you attempt to drill (not to cut) something with a flint point you'll see that the edge will be distroyed fast.
/. crowd sees many colored lights and keeps talking about them (it's sunday, the real engineers are resting, and the real archaeologists did not recover after the saturday ... party). /. more often, since it's fun to know that people think that the drilling does the job, not the filling applied on a clean tooth.
... then you'll see why the article was about the "stone dildo".
Flint flakes
My gues is this:
1. Archaeologist needes funds.
2. Archaeologist looks around and sees lots of pointy objects.
3. Archaeologist looks at his work table and sees tooth with hole in it.
4. Archaeologist sees the light.
5. Press sees the light.
6. Pakistani authorities see the light, too, since it's nice to have something to show to those arogant Westerners.
7. Archaeologist gets the funds.
8.
9. Dentists have a good time and promise themselves to read
Remember the stone dildo BBC wrote about some time ago ? Imagine how much attention would have been received by an article with the title "A tool for resharpening flint blades was discovered in almost perfect condition"
There is also evidence that the dentist repeatedly asked "Is it safe?" during the procedure.
He would then continue, regardless of how the patient answered.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
This drilling, as well as trepanning and some forms of massage, could also be explained as a method of releasing or removing the "evil wind" from the body part. Your tooth feels like it's about to explode with pain? Let's drill a hole in it to release that pesky demon!
Once again you talk out of your ass, and others corrected you.
Is it so hard fo you to at least ATTEMPT to be accurate? Or is that not part of how you troll?
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...