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Updated: May 18, 2026
07:57
Sampling and Pretreatment of Tooth Enamel Carbonate for Stable Carbon and Oxygen Isotope Analysis
Published on: August 15, 2018
Palaeontology: early Neolithic tradition of dentistry
A Coppa1, L Bondioli, A Cucina
1Dipartimento BAU, Università La Sapienza, 00185 Rome, Italy.
Nature
|April 7, 2006
Abstract:
Prehistoric evidence for the drilling of human teeth in vivo has so far been limited to isolated cases from less than six millennia ago. Here we describe eleven drilled molar crowns from nine adults discovered in a Neolithic graveyard in Pakistan that dates from 7,500-9,000 years ago. These findings provide evidence for a long tradition of a type of proto-dentistry in an early farming culture.
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