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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.
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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?
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."
...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 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.
Why has there been such a precedent lately to post old news?
http://chickencamels.poemofquotes.com/
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].
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).
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"
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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
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.
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
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
Recently deciphered cave painting:
Today Only! Special Two for one Special:
You're already in pain, and it's going to get worse before it gets better. So why not get Trepanned while your tooth is extracted?
"My molars were killing me," said one satisfied customer,"and I'd always wanted to have a hole drilled in my skull, so I said to myself, 'You're going to pass out from unbearable pain anyway, so why not?' Now I get respect like never before. I tell my hunting buddies that I lost my teeth in a fight with a cave bear. And confidentially, the hole in my head is a big success with the ladies, if you get my drift. Thank you Flint Dentistry!"
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You, Sir, are qualified to be in management.
Table-ized A.I.
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.)
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