9,000-Year-Old Dental Drill Is Found

[icymist]

By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer

April 5, 2006, 12:05 PM EDT


WASHINGTON -- Proving prehistoric man's ingenuity and ability to withstand and inflict excruciating pain, researchers have found that dental drilling dates back 9,000 years.

Primitive dentists drilled nearly perfect holes into live but undoubtedly unhappy patients between 5500 B.C. and 7000 B.C., an article in Thursday's journal Nature reports. Researchers carbon-dated at least nine skulls with 11 drill holes found in a Pakistan graveyard.

That means dentistry is at least 4,000 years older than first thought -- and far older than the useful invention of anesthesia

ouch! Link

[King Coal]

1. That can't be. God created the earth 6 thousand years ago.

Don't you watch the Sopranos?

[Warpy]

2. They had plenty of opium, I'm sure

and opium cultivation is about as old as the human race is.

Oh, the patients still felt the pain. They just didn't CARE, which is one of the main benefits of opiates, that reduction in pain associated anxiety.

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. I was gonna say there is no way to corroborate what knowledge they had of

herbs and so forth. Or maybe they did it Xena style and hit all the right pressure points and knocked people out? *l*

[monktonman]

4. makes me think my dentist is 9000 years old

[bananas]

5. Did they try it out to see if it still works?

[MuseRider]

6. Torture

everything old is new again, or something like that.

Cool!

[melody]

7. Must've been the last MediCAL dentist

(This will only be understood by Californians, I suspect) lol

[YankeyMCC]

8. And a few feet away they found

magazines dated back 10,000 to 12,000 years.

:) Someone had to do it.