Dr. Laura Weyrich

So actually creating, you know, small tools enough to drill down into the top of a tooth where you have tooth decay and you have a lot of pain, it probably would have been an enormously painful process to give yourself, you know, effectively a root canal.

I think it was probably made out of jasper.

So, you know, like a hard rock-like substance, right, that you could sharpen and kind of whittle down, right, to be a little bit of a drill that you would have massaged between your fingers and rotated back and forth to get it to drill down through that sort of enamel and release that pain, right?

The researchers also estimate it would have taken somewhere between like 30 and 40 minutes to drill these holes, right?

And so it's not just a quick, you know, mechanical drill that's in your mouth.

This is something where someone's probably holding you down and the other person is probably, you know, needling back and forth with this rock tool.

in your tooth to release that pain and pressure.

So, you know, who knows if they were able to find some, you know, plants that helped with that pain resolution after it.

I sure hope so.

Yeah, absolutely.

From our perspective, teeth are not just teeth.

They're also all of the bacteria and viruses and fungi that are living on the outside of them.

And, you know, those microorganisms bind together and form a film that grows on your teeth, you know, and you'll feel it yourself.

If you ever drink a sugary drink, you kind of feel that grossness, you know, dental plaque that is a film that is a microbial biofilm.

The really awesome thing about that, though, is it calcifies at night when you sleep.

And it turns into this rock hard matrix, locking all those bacteria, as well as anything else that might be in the local environment in it, in place.

So if you don't have modern dentistry, it never gets removed.

So, you know, Neanderthals and very ancient humans would have had this

dental plaque, which when it's calcified, we call it dental calculus, and it would have built up over their entire lifetime.

We also study all these really healthy microbes in your body called the microbiome, and many of those live on your teeth, and those are directly linked to chronic disease development.