What Did Ancient Humans Do About Toothache?

No dentist. No painkillers. No anaesthetic. Just you, your jaw, and however long it took. Here's the part most people get wrong: hunter-gatherers had better teeth than you do. Almost no cavities at all. Farming is what wrecked the human mouth. Grain, starch and sticky food arrived, and cavity rates climbed and never came back down. But they had a different problem, and it was arguably worse. Grinding food between stones puts grit in every meal, and over a lifetime that sandpapers your teeth flat until the living nerve is exposed to open air. Then comes the abscess, and an abscess in a world without antibiotics can kill you. So what did they actually do about it? More than you'd think. A Neanderthal at El Sidron was chewing poplar bark, which contains the active ingredient in aspirin. Neanderthal teeth at Krapina have toothpick grooves worn into them from 130,000 years ago. At Mehrgarh in Pakistan there are 9,000-year-old molars drilled with flint. In Italy, teeth were filled with bitumen 13,000 years ago. In Slovenia, a cracked tooth was sealed with beeswax. All of it completely awake.