This Prehistoric Trick Exhibits How Ice Age Folks Harvested Tooth for Jewellery

When piecing collectively the cultural practices of historical people, conventional archaeologists depend on clues from artifacts comparable to instruments, bones, and pottery. Experimental archaeologists, nevertheless, go a step additional—recreating previous behaviors to expertise how individuals as soon as lived.

That’s exactly what a crew of researchers just lately did to research how Stone Age communities in northeastern Europe extracted animal tooth to supply equipment. Led by Aija Macāne, a visiting scholar within the Division of Cultures on the College of Helsinki, the archaeologists personally examined seven completely different extraction strategies to find out which have been best and environment friendly. Their findings, printed June 20 within the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, provide new insights into the lives of prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

“Our experiments present that tooth extraction was a deliberate, time-sensitive course of embedded in each day life, particularly cooking practices,” Macāne said in a college assertion. “This challenges the belief that tooth used for ornaments have been merely scavenged or simply out there.”

In line with the researchers, animal tooth have been among the many commonest supplies used to make jewellery, equipment, and different private adornments throughout the Stone Age, particularly within the Northern Hemisphere. Consultants know this due to websites like Zvejnieki, a burial floor in northern Latvia the place hunter-gatherers laid individuals to relaxation for about 5 millennia—from 7,500 to 2,600 BCE. Greater than 2,000 animal tooth have been excavated from the graves at Zvejnieki, making it a main location to review how historical people interacted with these supplies.

Archaeologists have extensively studied animal tooth pendants from this web site, investigating which species they got here from, how they have been used, the place they have been positioned inside graves, and the way they have been made. Far fewer research, nevertheless, have regarded into the method of extracting tooth and the bodily traces this leaves behind, the researchers word.

To fill that data hole, Macāne and her colleagues bought their palms soiled—actually. The crew carried out a sequence of experiments to check seven completely different prehistoric strategies for extracting tooth: reducing, percussion (or putting), air drying, soaking, direct warmth, and two cooking methods. They selected these methods based mostly on earlier archaeological and ethnographic analysis. “Whereas different strategies could possibly be examined, we argue that these seven are the most definitely given the applied sciences out there presently,” the researchers state of their report.

Over the course of 1 yr, they skilled what it was wish to be Stone Age people in want of some toothy bling. The researchers carried out their experiments on the Īdeņa Experimental Centre in jap Latvia, which allowed them to supply the required uncooked supplies from licensed native hunters. In whole, they used seven skulls or mandibles from Eurasian elk, two from wild boar, and two from roe deer.

Of all of the strategies they examined, the 2 cooking methods proved best. Boiling a mandible in a ceramic pot not solely poached the meat, however precipitated gentle tissues to detach from the bone, making it straightforward to manually extract the tooth. Inserting complete skulls inside an earth oven—a dug-out pit used to lure warmth and, on this case, steam meals—had the identical impact.

Each strategies allowed for prime extraction charges with out damaging the tooth, with the added bonus of creating a meal and rendering the remainder of the bones appropriate for tool-making. These findings counsel that tooth extraction might have been built-in into broader cultural practices, merging meals preparation, the making of private adornments, and funerary rituals.

As for the opposite methods, soaking proved profitable, however didn’t provide further advantages. Chopping or putting the tooth to take away them additionally labored, however that always trigger injury. The final two strategies—air drying and making use of direct warmth—didn’t yield profitable outcomes.

“Whereas this examine centered principally on the tooth pendant assemblage from the Zvejnieki cemetery, our outcomes have broader implications for understanding tooth extraction and pendant manufacturing throughout prehistory,” the researchers state. “By analyzing methods used for tooth extraction, we now have gained beneficial insights into human conduct and cultural practices throughout the Stone Age.”

Nonetheless, questions stay. The researchers hope their examine will encourage different archaeologists to search for bodily traces of the extraction course of on animal tooth artifacts. Additionally they emphasize the significance of investigating tooth from different species, together with people and canines. Such work, they argue, would shed “a crucial gentle on the complexity and significance of those practices.”