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."

Comments

That's not a very nice thing to say

[ZaMoose]

I mean, I'm not the biggest Val Kilmer fan around, but c'mon, that's just downright insulting!

Maybe he was British

[stevegee58]

An American Ice Man would have had braces as a cave child.

Re:Paleo diet

[Anonymous Coward]

Grain. Hardly paleo.

Top GNU

[Dogtanian]

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*

Re:Nationality ID'd

[nametaken]

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.

Re:Paleo diet

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Re:That's the inconvenient truth of "the simple li

[turbidostato]

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.

Re:That's the inconvenient truth of "the simple li

[ColdWetDog]

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.

Re:That's the inconvenient truth of "the simple li

[pwizard2]

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.