“Treating a carious tooth is not just feeding or guarding someone. It requires diagnosing the source of pain, selecting an appropriate tool, performing a painful, invasive action, and persisting despite the patient’s discomfort,” said Kolobova. “That is active, targeted medical intervention.”

In Zubova and her colleagues’ experiments, it took about 50 minutes to drill through the enamel and dentin and breach the pulp cavity. The researchers say it could have taken about twice that long if they were working in the cramped confines of a patient’s mouth, with limited visibility and awkward working angles. (Also, Og tends to fidget a lot.)

The single, drilled-out tooth also reveals an element of problem-solving and medical knowledge. It’s not a huge intuitive leap to think that if you take out the part that hurts, the pain might go away, but these Neanderthals had worked out the next step: how to remove the infected tissue without yanking out the whole tooth, instead choosing to spend an hour or two trying to hold Og’s head still.

😮

The Chagyrskaya procedure happened around 59,000 years ago; the next oldest evidence of dentistry comes from a 14,000-year-old site called Ripari Villabruna in what’s now northern Italy—and even that wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as the work done at Chagyrskaya. It looks like someone at Ripari Villabruna scraped away the infected upper layer of the patient’s tooth enamel but left behind the dentin and pulp. That wouldn’t have done much to relieve the patient’s pain, but an attempt was made.

the “future” of homo Homo sapiens then, if we need to be more precise 🫣