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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

But here’s the surprise: the Broken Hill skull is a strange (and still largely unexplained [doi.org]) anomaly. Look into the mouths of most other early human fossils and you’ll rarely find a dental cavity. Strangely, for millions of years of human prehistory our ancestors were blessed with generally good oral health [doi.org] - even though their dental healthcare consisted of little more than the use of simple toothpicks.

In fact, rotten teeth only became a common problem very recently - about 10,000 years ago - at the dawn of the Neolithic period, a time when our ancestors began farming. Relatively sophisticated dentistry emerged soon after. In the last decade or so archaeologists have found evidence from cultures across the world that bad teeth were scraped, scoured, even drilled and filled apparently to remove decayed tissue.

Or, to put it another way, it looks like the dental drill predates writing, civilisation, and even the invention of the wheel by thousands of years.

...
Last year, Stefano Benazzi [unibo.it] at the University of Bologna, Italy, and his colleagues took a closer look at a 14,000-year-old adult male skull that was found on a dig in Italy in the late 1980s. They discovered signs that the biting surface of one rotten tooth in the jaw had been deliberately scoured and scraped with a tool [doi.org] - perhaps in an effort to remove the decayed tissue.

Theories about the rise of tooth decay in humans include the introduction of carbohydrates to the diet from farming and the increase in female fertility (pregnancy changes the pH of saliva and allows the formation of more acids. But experiments by scientists show that bow-drilling tooth enamel with stone tips can penetrate in under a minute, so drilling teeth for dentistry by early humans was entirely practicable.

Interesting article [bbc.com] worth reading in full.

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