{"id":509659,"date":"2026-05-30T02:15:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T02:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/509659\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T02:15:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T02:15:09","slug":"recent-analysis-shows-neanderthals-may-have-been-first-dentists-in-recorded-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/509659\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent analysis shows Neanderthals may have been first dentists in recorded history"},"content":{"rendered":"<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">One of the most dreaded terms in dentistry is \u201croot canal,\u201d but at least we get to enjoy the perks of modern medicine. Now, imagine enduring that painful process nearly 60,000 years ago.<\/p>\n<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">An international team of scientists believes they have found evidence that Neanderthals, the closest relatives of modern humans, deliberately drilled a hole in a lower molar tooth to remove infected tissue.<\/p>\n<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">The discovery represents the oldest known example of invasive dental treatment, and it occurred tens of thousands of years before the earliest known example of dentistry in Homo sapiens.<\/p>\n<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">The news serves as another example showcasing that Neanderthals were remarkably complicated ancient relatives.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"A collection of experimental tools crafted from local jasperoid raw material. Dotted lines illustrate the functional parts of these tools. Photo: journals.plos.org\" data-qa=\"BaseImage-handleRenderImage-StyledImage\" class=\"e1gf69pb2 css-6ikqhs e445x7d0\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/461bcd44-a461-4313-a95b-349f57060053_62ccfbac.jpg\" title=\"A collection of experimental tools crafted from local jasperoid raw material. Dotted lines illustrate the functional parts of these tools. Photo: journals.plos.org\"\/>A collection of experimental tools crafted from local jasperoid raw material. Dotted lines illustrate the functional parts of these tools. Photo: journals.plos.org<\/p>\n<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">\u201c[The medical treatment] brings Neanderthal behaviour closer to modern humans and differentiates that behaviour from the instinctive actions of other primates,\u201d wrote the authors in a study published in PLOS ONE, an open-access science journal, on May 13.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the most dreaded terms in dentistry is \u201croot canal,\u201d but at least we get to enjoy&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509660,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[77],"tags":[93445,32243,221055,381,5214,221056,57640,59919,18,518,3292,19,17,13482,100086,3295,10082,218205,550,133,76632,98057,5591],"class_list":["post-509659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-altai-mountains","tag-ancient","tag-ancient-toothpick","tag-china","tag-chinese","tag-dental-treatment","tag-dentistry","tag-dentists","tag-eire","tag-food","tag-homo-sapiens","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kazakhstan","tag-mongolia","tag-neanderthal","tag-neanderthals","tag-plos-one","tag-russia","tag-science","tag-siberia","tag-stone-tools","tag-survival"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}