By Ashley Strickland, CNN
(CNN) — An unusual tooth found in a cave offers a rare glimpse into a surprising procedure prehistoric humans might have performed to fix a cavity 59,000 years ago.
Researchers uncovered the lower molar of an adult Neanderthal in Chagryskaya Cave in what’s now Russia, located in southwestern Siberia’s Altai Mountains, a site where populations of these early humans lived between about 49,000 and 70,000 years ago.
Dubbed Chagyrskaya 64, the tooth stood out among dozens of others found in the cave because its crown featured a deep, irregular hole that extended all the way into the pulp chamber, or the inner cavity containing nerves and blood vessels. The chasm looked like a painful cavity that took up most of the tooth’s chewing surface.
Scientists were further intrigued when they spied scratches on the tooth around the hole, suggesting manipulation using a tool of some sort. Fine-pointed stone tools also unearthed in the cave provided possible clues to what made the marks.
Multiple scans of the Neanderthal tooth, as well as experiments using tools on modern human teeth, suggest that someone had essentially drilled out the cavity. This evidence points to the earliest known instance of dental cavity intervention in human evolutionary history, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.
Such behavior indicates that Neanderthals could identify an infection and craft and select the right tools and techniques to alleviate the pain it caused — as well as endure a painful procedure. Wear patterns on the tooth also show that the individual was able to keep using their tooth after the procedure.
“What amazed me was how intuitively the person who owned this tooth understood exactly where the pain was coming from and realized that its source could be removed,” said lead study author Alisa Zubova, senior researcher at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. “We have never encountered anything like this before — neither among Neanderthals nor among modern humans from much later periods.”
The findings add to a growing body of evidence that Neanderthals — our closest extinct human relatives — were cognitively and psychologically more similar to modern humans than previously thought, rather than the simple-minded, brutish cavemen of earlier stereotypes.
“This tells us that the emotional and conscious parts of the Neanderthal mind operated independently, just as they do in modern humans,” Zubova said.
Evidence of medical intervention
Nonhuman primates like chimpanzees have demonstrated the ability to treat themselves or others in their community with medicinal plants — a behavior that experts have said is instinctual.
Neanderthals appear to have done the same, aiding members of their species who experienced injuries or hearing loss by sharing food or protecting them as a form of social care, said study coauthor Ksenia Kolobova, head of the Laboratory of Digital Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, Russia.
However, researchers have long tried to distinguish whether early humans such as Neanderthals were capable of taking that care a step further by implementing deliberate medical strategies.
When the researchers saw the cavity-afflicted tooth, they wondered whether the potential evidence for the tooth’s manipulation could showcase an example of targeted medical intervention.
Scratches on Neanderthal teeth had been seen before, suggesting they used toothpicks to remove food or even chewed on medicinal plants. But cavities were a rare i