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Iceman Had Bad Teeth
sciencehabit writes "Europe's best-known mummy wasn't just a medical mess; he also had terrible teeth, according to a new study. Ötzi, a Stone Age man who died atop a glacier about 5300 years ago, suffered from severe gum disease and cavities. When Ötzi was discovered atop a glacier on the Austro-Italian border, his frozen corpse was intensively studied. But no one took a close look at his teeth until now. Using 3D computer tomography (a CAT scan), the hunter's mouth could be examined for clues as to the life he led. A fall or other accident killed one of his front teeth, still discolored millennia later. And he may have had a small stone, gone unnoticed in his whole-grain bread or gruel, to thank for a broken molar. That gruel may be the culprit behind Ötzi's cavities and gum disease, too. The uptick in starches, the researchers suggest, could explain the increasing frequency of cavities in teeth from the time—a problem that's been with us ever since."
I mean, I'm not the biggest Val Kilmer fan around, but c'mon, that's just downright insulting!
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
From the No-Shit-Sherlock dept.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
An American Ice Man would have had braces as a cave child.
Hah!
How did this guy get all the way from the UK to the Austro-Italian border? And he didn't have to bring his own gruel, when he could,ve had a nice Austro-Italian sausage and maybe some goulash, with some fine wine to wash it down. The Europeans really were a bunch of savages. I mean, look at them, still at war with each other... and the world...
In other news, reports are coming in that CO2 levels around the developed world rose momentarily; as if huge numbers of people exhaled in unision.
If the shoe fits, it's ugly.
Dentists? Nope
Doctors? Nope
Nationwide medical coverage? Nope
Anesthetics? Nope
Rather Complicated Operations? Yes, surprisingly - but at full consciousness!
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Any comments regarding what you should eat to avoid or even remineralize cavities? Just today I was researching this subject, found even a dedicated book related to the subject, which might be garbage or not. But anyway.
This proves that he was Anglo-Saxon in origin. We'll have to rewrite history.
Well, things can always be a little too simple, but that doesn't mean we should make them as complicated/not-simple/technological as possible. It's perfectly possible to have good health without being inundated with technology for our entire lives.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm no forensic expert, but wouldn't tooth decay continue after death? How are posthumous cavities differentiated from cavities formed during life?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
TFA mentions that he ate gruel and grains and that was probably to blame for his poor dental health. They're also blaming mechanical damage from tool holding and chewing sand with his gruel. I find it pretty unlikely that he would eat sandy gruel, they were prehistoric, not stupid. If they were stupid, we wouldn't have gotten the chance to be as stupid as we are as a race.
Only I can judge you.
Grain. Hardly paleo.
5,300 years ago would have been the neolithic period, so technically, a neolithic diet gave this guy terrible teeth.
Bet he still regrets missing all those dental appointments.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
The summary contains almost the entire FA. But there is this...
In the late Stone Age, humans were increasingly incorporating coarsely ground grain into their diets. The uptick in starches, the researchers suggest, could explain the increasing frequency of cavities in teeth from the time—a problem that's been with us ever since.
In other words, it was no longer the "Paleo diet" and a shift away from it is what brought about bad oral health.
So that's what a Paleo diet gets you... terrible teeth. Seriously, thank science for all we have!
Wrong.
his whole-grain bread or gruel, to thank for a broken molar. That gruel may be the culprit behind Ötzi's cavities and gum disease, too. The uptick in starches, the researchers suggest, could explain the increasing frequency of cavities in teeth from the time—a problem that's been with us ever since.
Paleo diets don't have grains in them.
Or maybe, just maybe living in a predental hygiene era might have had something to do with it. Maybe. Not like the guy had gallons and gallons of delicious delicious bacon flavored scope on hand to keep his breath nice and truck stop bathroom fresh.
I got here through a series of tubes
The iceman was neolithic, not paleolithic. It's grains and added starches that gave this man bad teeth, as the article correctly noted. The Paleo diet removes grains completely and limits starches to people with very active lifestyles. I had transparent teeth before Paleo, no problems ever since.
Forget the article, you didn't even read the whole summary, I see. "The uptick in starches, the researchers suggest, could explain the increasing frequency of cavities in teeth from the time---a problem that's been with us ever since." In other words, tooth decay isn't caused by lack of dentists. It's caused by eating food that isn't the natural diet for human beings. Dentistry is only needed to fix a problem we've caused ourselves.
People didn't only live until 30. That statistic is an average: Infant mortality was high, but if people made it through childhood, they died in their 60s-80s just like they do nowadays. Go look up a few random historical figures from ancient times if you don't believe me. Socrates died in his 70s. Plato made it to 80. Aristotle, 62. Roman Emperor Augustus, 76. Tiberius, 78.
But I suppose these are some of the myths you need to believe in, and propagate, to support "national health coverage." So by all means carry on.
Liberty in your lifetime
Yeah, it's true, but what about Wolverine's B.O.?
How do we even know this "Paleo diet" would cause one to have good oral health?
The whole "Paleo diet" reeks of silly Noble Savage crap to me.
He was found 22 years ago. It took that long to examine his teeth?
He likely did not have freedom of speech either. Was the great Washington perhaps lying?
But I suppose these are some of the myths you need to believe in, and propagate, to support "national health coverage." So by all means carry on.
I'm not even from the US.
(But where I live, we have "national health coverage", thank you.)
But it's true - corn-starches aren't very good for the overall health.
Nevertheless, teeth need a lot of attention - and sometimes a dentist.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Why didn't we evolve to have better teeth? Even animals don't need to brush. I'm sure if we just ate unrefined foods we found in nature we'd still have cavities. Wouldn't this have been one of the first things for evolution to solve?
Instead of listing the richest folks who had access to the best of everything, how about you tell me how long the median farmer lived.
I suppose these are myths you need to support "Fuck you, I got mine." So by all means, carry on.
Thanks for the lazy news.
It's not even news, really. It's just observation. Like walking outside during a thunderstorm, then printing: "New Discovery: Rain Soaks Your Clothes." Or "Ninjas Love Pork Rinds."
They blew stuff to smithereens!
why we should care about a mob hit man's dental hygiene?
Well, things can always be a little too simple, but that doesn't mean we should make them as complicated/not-simple/technological as possible. It's perfectly possible to have good health without being inundated with technology for our entire lives.
No actually it isn't. You just don't realise that: spoken language, currency, written language, specialized education, calendars, etc. are technology. Not to mention: stethoscopes, toothbrushes, anatomy, cell theory, germ theory, etc.
Good luck having a modern lifespan without a nontrivial subset of technology.
ONE comment, and you've already beaten me to the Val Kilmer joke...
Considering this is Slashdot, I'd have expected the obligatory joke "Iceman" reference to have been Spiderman and his Amazing Friends, not bloody Top Gun. I can't believe that I'm the first. Hand in your geek cards at once... >:-(
Anyway.... "Iceman had bad teeth? That's nothing, Firestar had BO and the other guy, er... could do what a spider can. Hang on, that last one's quite cool."
*ahem*
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
...back then, you only lived to 30, if you were good.
Ugh. Why do people keep saying stuff like this?
If child A dies at 2 years old. And child B dies at 58. The average life expectancy is 30. Back then it was either death before six or after sixty. If you made it past six, you were officially a tough motherfucker and would probably live at least into your sixties.
Last I read the British have better dental hygiene than us Americans do. They're just not as fixated on the bleaching and such.
And before some horse's ass drags out the new "i'm confused by your 'americans' reference", I meant the US.
When I lived in the US, I repeatedly heard the same comment : "You Europeans, you are total perverts and therefore hot - but you all have bad teeth". Didn't know it already started then. Is it a coincidence I live in Austria ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Wasn't this what the movie Austin Powers was about?
*I'm not a coward, I'm just lazy*
...back then, you only lived to 30, if you were good.
Getting to 30 was a struggle, yes. You had to survive birth, getting raised to the age of being a productive member of society, getting past the childbearing years (women) or the primary hunter/war party years (men). If you made it to 30, you actually had a good chance of living to 60, before you would succumb to disease.
Even in modern society, the rich don't live that much longer then the poor. And for the vast majority of history, everyone had access to the same level of health care: Folk remedies, leeches, hopes and dreams.
The rich had access to food that was not rotting, did not starve, and water that was clean. For the vast majority of human history the amount and quality of food available varied greatly based on income and social standing.
And he may have had a small stone, gone unnoticed in his whole-grain bread or gruel, to thank for a broken molar. That gruel may be the culprit behind Ötzi's cavities and gum disease, too. The uptick in starches, the researchers suggest, could explain the increasing frequency of cavities in teeth from the time—a problem that's been with us ever since."
Didn't even have to RTFA especially that second sentence
That is a very old child.
Paleolithic is pre-agriculture, which is more like 10K+ years ago. Grains and starches are neolithic concepts.... so this is what a fairly MODERN diet gets you - sugar rotting your teeth out.
Actually it's pretty well established in the archeological record. Prior to wheat and rye agriculture the human diet was pretty similar to that of Homo Habilis, so we had plenty of time to adapt to that. Subsequent to the establishment of agriculture in the Middle East dental disease became a major cause of death, and in Europe in some portions of the Middle Ages it was the single leading cause of death. It seems to be more associated with a wheat and rye diet though, because I don't believe the same thing was seen in the areas where rice or maize were the principle grain crops. (Could be wrong, since I'm just working on memory.) Small stones left in flour seem to have been the primary culprit in many cases, breaking teeth, getting stuck between teeth, and injuring gums.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Consider how many wild animals brush their teeth.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
OK... My bad, you guys are right, this guy was neolithic, not paleolithic, I'm sorry. Yup, you heard it right, someone on the internet admitting they were wrong, and apologizing for it!
Farming is actually a pretty healthy lifestyle. Lots of outdoor physical work, not cramped in with thousands of other people in cities, good rest periods after the harvest, plenty of food unless the crops fail, oh yes you could do worse than being a farmer.
One of the problems with claiming what "the" paleo diet consisted of is that it varied hugely from time to time and place to place.
Unsurprisingly, the world before "the" invention of agriculture was not a giant homogeneous culture with the same diet everywhere.
For the most part, diets in the winter vs summer were remarkably different, even for the same people. There are many exceptions, though, where the diet didn't vary much year round.
Even the diets from places as close together as, say, western Oregon and Utah from 13,000 years ago were hugely different. The Pleistocene Oregon diet consisted of large amounts of seafood, rabbits, tubers, and, yes, lots of wild grains. In Utah there was significantly more larger game, more meat, including more fat, different berries, more grains and less tubers.
And, yes, even without lots of grains, throughout the archaeological record, people frequently had bad teeth. Worn flat by sand and bits of dirt in their food the was rule, not the exception, and cavities and abscesses were more common than not throughout the Americas. I imagine it would be similar to Europe and Africa.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Subsequent to the establishment of agriculture in the Middle East dental disease became a major cause of death
Ramesses II might have died of dental infection. I don't think he had a single healthy tooth in his mouth. The gritty Egyptian flour with an admixture of sand (which is sort of difficult to avoid in Egypt!) didn't help any.
Of course, the problems with agricultural nutrition were many-fold: pollen analysis of the layers found in Jarmo and other places suggests that the range of plants consumed dropped from about two hundred to mere eight or so, leading to malnutrition, decreased stature, lots of developmental problems - I guess the teeth development suffered as well from the malnutrition alone. The quern work also led to skeletal deformation in women, as they had to work it for extended periods of time.
I'm absolutely not surprised by these findings, indeed, I didn't expect them to find anything else!
Ezekiel 23:20
Nothing's hanged it's just like present day America
Healthcare nope
Heart desease yes
Diabetes yes
Lunch break no
40 hour week no
Slave wages yes
You can date the introduction of agriculture in a population by the age of the skulls with cavities. No agriculture = no cavities. This is not news; fermentable carbohydrates rot your teeth.
Nationwide medical coverage? Nope
You are not in the US, right? Kidding!!
Hmm. What's that ... horse? ... bison? ... no ... bullshit.
US healthcare costs twice as much (per capita) as the UK and the outcome is the same.
I'll leave it up to you to figure out why and who is being fucked over by it.
Does licking their butt count?
You should not compare cave men to Romans. Romans were technologically over a thousand years ahead of their time. They had water supply and sanitation, good roads, market system and everything quite advanced. The Greeks were significantly closer to the Romans than cave men.
Or maybe, just maybe living in a predental hygiene era might have had something to do with it.
Both. He lived after the invention of flour and before the invention of toothbrush. That was a very unfortunate period for everyone's teeth.
Ezekiel 23:20
How do we even know this "Paleo diet" would cause one to have good oral health?
It's called paleopathology. That's how we know.
Ezekiel 23:20
You have a nice hypothesis. Now go for the hard data: look for countries with better life indexes and higher life expectancy than USA (yes, there's quite a lot of them). Now note down which one of them has NOT socialized medicine.
HINT: no one of them, not a single one.
Every once in a while, you hear of some local government or some NGO sponsoring an expensive piece of equipment for a hospital, then even with judicious use the hospital runs out of the yearly cap by May, making that equipment gather dust.
While here in good ol free market USA, virtually all our major equipment in our small rural hospital has been purchased by funds from various NGOs because we don't have the right mix of patients to make money off the bizarre US system. To add insult to injury to 'the best medical system in the world', we have increasing problems with drug unavailability. Nothing like a lack of sterile saline solution to kick your medicine back a couple hundred years.
The US system is failing on so many levels that it's pretty embarrassing.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Actually IIRC, and its been years since I read this, but opium poppies were used for pain killers for ages before they were refined into what we know as morphine, kinda like how the Romans would proscribe a trip to the spa for those having mental problems and it turns out later that the baths were loaded with lithium.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This is the one area that lags behind all else in humans it seems. Without extreme maintenance teeth are good until about 30 if you are lucky, while everything else seems to hit triple digits(or close) pretty easily by comparison.
Why is this?
Granted, because there was much less "dope" around, people reacted better to less potent anesthetics - but I don't think you can compare it to what you get today in a hospital or with OTC paracetamol-derivates...
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
He is correct: when you remove infant mortality from the numbers the average age at death jumps dramatically. Those "the average roman only lived to 19" stats are total crap. If you think about it, we would have died out in a few generations if that were true, since parents would have died while most children were still too young to care for themselves. As for the median farmer, unless they worked themselves to death or had zero sense of hygiene, they may not have fared much worse, on average. They probably had a better diet, lacking the "rich" foods the richest folks would have had access to, and let's face it: medicine back then was hit or miss if it helped or killed you faster.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Yeah, like having the crap beaten out of you and everything stolen when you farmed better that the people in the next valley (they actually still do this in Papua New Guinea). No use calling the cops in those days - sort of like now really.
of the cavities, but having periodontal problems is one of the hallmark signs of scurvy- a vitamin C deficiency. It is plausible that he didn't have a source of vitamin C in his diet.
Is Richard Kuklinsky
Mod parent up.
To compare the Romans to cavemen is an insult. Romans were extremely advanced for the time. The legions (when not fighting) could build damn near anything and could build it to last. Roman roads survived the middle ages with little to no maintenance and are still servicable today. Meanwhile, our roads quickly crumble and deteriorate without yearly maintenance. Roman aquaducts and sewers meant that cities had running water and decent sanitation (including flush toilets), something not seen again until the late 19th-20th century. After the collapse of Rome, Europe would spend the next 1800 years shitting in a bucket. Romans even had a primitive steam engine. It wasn't deployed much (if at all) outside of design drawings but a steam-powered vehicle could have been possible if the empire had lasted a bit longer.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Not sure how accurate it is, but the information here says Amish life span is the same as the average American.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"Cavemen" dying at 30 is a pretty easy to disprove myth if you think about it. First, 30 is the average and infant mortality was high. (Another case where averages don't tell you anything useful.) Second, humans have menopause at age 50-60, which is rather uncommon in the animal kingdom. If our ancestors didn't live that long there'd be no reason for that adaptation. Third, our brain doesn't fully develop until our mid to late twenties, which is a good indicator we lived a bit longer (we're not a fly, our adult stage doesn't exist solely for reproduction). Fourth, with a low carbohydrate diet (e.g. many paleolithic diets) puberty doesn't happen until the twenties. Fifth, even without medical care, modern hunter gatherers lived decently long lives despite being pushed to rather inhospitable regions.
The reason for the misconception is that agriculture had a "payback period" of a few thousand years. Before agriculture we ate an extremely diverse diet and used endurance hunting to take down prey. About 10 - 20 hours per week were spent gathering food, so there was plenty of time to develop culture. Early agriculture significantly cut that diversity (i.e. 200+ types of food to 7), and required upwards of a hundred hours per week with the primitive tools of the time. Obviously lifespan was drastically reduced, but fortunately puberty was pushed forward by a decade. So, for the past few thousand years, human quality of life has been improving. Thus, the original setback was forgotten, and we celebrate our continued progress.
So are you saying the Amish don't have spoken language, currency, written language, specialized education, calendars, stethoscopes, toothbrushes, anatomy, cell theory, germ theory, etc? Because you'd be wrong
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Certainly possible. Although, when he was found he was carrying fruit with him.
Admitting you're wrong and apologizing for it? This must be some fancy troll business.
I don't know. I have a tolerance of a bull rhino but if you have never taken squat? Don't forget the Indians ate a tree bark that turned out to be aspirin, and you know that there wasn't shit compared to like a BC powder but it worked well enough for them to keep it for centuries. I mean its practically impossible to compare what we feel to what they felt because frankly we are exposed to chemicals in the womb, you just know your mom was taking aspirin and other drugs while she was pregnant, their bodies were pristine compared to the chemical sewer that is modern man.
Hell I read somewhere you can't even find a river in the USA that won't test positive for chemicals, from hormones to mental treatment drugs, we really can't tell how they were able to treat themselves by looking at us because we just swim in chemicals constantly, everything we eat and drink is chemicals so naturally our tolerances are gonna be just crazy compared to them. Look at how the peasants in the Andes mountains chew on coca leaves which I've been told by chewing you aren't even get what we get in an energy drink as far as effect but it works for them, who knows how little it took for somebody who had never so much as taken a drop of anything?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Seems he ran out of his supply of Swiss choccies in the middle of winter, then tried to cross the alps to get to his nearest Migros to stock up.
Actually, once you strip out the effects of child mortality and the violence, healthy lifespan through history is not much different. Nowadays we get an extra ten-twenty years through geriatric medicine, but if you were a healthy 30yo back then you had more or less the same chance of ending up a 70yo as you do now.
[FUCK BETA]
Please come to Poland and try visit a doctor then. Dissatisfaction guaranteed.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
It seems those getting the crap beaten out of them could benefit from ready access to firearms. Having known a few people with ties to Papua New Guinea, I can affirm the merit of your statement and add weight to the veracity of my own. Even given the potential for intrusions by similarly armed aggressors, people tend to think twice about such acts when the potential to be shot dead is significant.
Write failed: Broken pipe
They tend to have terrible teeth.
Abscesses are not exactly an unknown cause of death for wild animals.
Please offer some more information.
How large a sample size do we possibly have?
There wasn't even one invention of agriculture, it apparently arose separately in SE Asia and the Americas around the same time, and IIRC there is evidence of bottle gourds being cultivated in western Africa several thousand years earlier as well.
My point was that with the more varied pre-agricultural diet tooth decay was considerably less common. There were no shortage of dental problems, especially among peoples who chewed skins to soften them or for whom marrow bones was a large part of the diet, but that's true of any large mammal.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
...back then, you only lived to 30, if you were good.
Citation needed. Sorry, but you are talking presumptions out of your ass. Mortality was higher, but not because people were less healthy. They were more healthy, they simply lived a more dangerous life.
I'm confused by your "British" reference.
Theory is that Ötzi was murdered. Now we know he was murdered because he was Europe's first vegan and couldn't STFU about it.
What an idiot.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Specifically, A shift to what we continue to use for the most part today.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.