I can only chew on one side now

My cousin says he can fix it. My cousin has a drill made of flint. — Farmer, about 7500 BC

About 9,000 years ago, in a farming village in what's now Pakistan, somebody took the flint drill they used for making beads and went after people's back teeth. Archaeologists have found 11 drilled teeth from nine adults. The edges were worn smooth from chewing afterward, so every patient lived, which is the good news and the only news. They kept at it for about 1,500 years. Then they quit, and nobody knows why. Can't imagine.

Still bugs us: the sound of the drill.

The full file

Somebody tried it. Researchers built a copy of the flint drill and bored through human teeth in under a minute each. Quick, at least.

Only four of the 11 drilled teeth show signs of decay. No fillings have turned up, though the researchers suspect something may have been packed into the holes.

They weren't the first to go after a bad tooth. A man buried at Riparo Villabruna in northern Italy about 14,000 years ago had the rot picked out of a molar with a pointed flint while he was still alive. And the oldest known filling may be beeswax, in a 6,500-year-old jaw found near Lonche, Slovenia, sealing a crack in a canine. That jaw sat in a museum in Italy for about a century before anybody noticed. Everybody puts off the dentist.

Relates to No. 00300.