Page 19 - Fall2011

TOOTH DECAY IS ANCIENT true decayed-and-missing-teeth index is impos-
Hunter-gatherers of the Archaic Period (ap- sible to calculate. A paper published in 2003 5
proximately 8,000-1,000 BC) in the lower Pecos summed up the situation well: "The 'real' caries
region of Texas, for example, had rampant tooth frequency is a fallacy in anthropological studies
decay and other forms of dental degeneration. because it is impossible to determine it in skeletal
Evidence documented in recent literature sug- populations."
gests that by age twenty-five, these people had The rate of dental decay in the Paleolithic
lost virtually all of their molars, and that almost period was probably widely variable, with some
everyone had lost all of their teeth by age forty. populations being very well nourished and other
Some investigators believe that this resulted populations facing malnutrition because of poor
from wear and tear caused by the consumption dietary choices, or perhaps more often because
of calcium oxalate crystals in cactus and agave. of scarcity in a given region as resources became
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Whatever the cause, we clearly do not require depleted or as groups migrated into new areas
modern industrial foods to suffer rampant dental presenting new and different challenges.
wear and decay.
Dental decay may have been much less com- WILD ANIMALS GET TOOTH DECAY
mon during the Paleolithic period, but the evi- Although Price noted that “in general, the
dence is quite limited. We can at least conclude, wild animal life has largely escaped many of
however, that dental decay existed during this the degenerative processes which affect modern
period. The Textbook of Oral Pathology states white peoples” (page 257), he also noted that
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the following: “primitive human beings have been freer from
the disease [tooth decay] than has contemporary
Dental caries is an ancient disease. . . . The animal life” (page 13).
prehistoric skulls have shown about 5 per- As a recent example, Figure 1, page 20,
cent of the teeth with caries, e.g. rampant shows a cavity found in a tooth of a wild bottle-
caries of middle Pleistocene skull. A similar nose dolphin. Researchers from Brazil and
less incidence of caries was seen in ancient New Zealand published this figure in a recent
hominids. But a gradual increase in the in- paper documenting “caries-like lesions” in wild
cidence rate of caries was seen in the Paleo- dolphins, studying over twenty-seven thousand
lithic, Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages. This teeth from just under three hundred fifty indi-
increase rate continued in medieval period vidual skeletons belonging to nine species of
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among Egyptians and Romans and reached dolphin. The dolphin skeletons were obtained
its acme in 17th century in Europe due to because they were either stranded or accidentally
easily available sugar and change in diet. entangled. “Caries-like lesions” were found in
three percent of the bottlenose dolphin skeletons
A recent paper showing new evidence for and in two percent of the estuarine dolphin skel-
dental pathologies in Neanderthals from forty etons. Sample sizes were much smaller for other
thousand years ago tallied up the number of de- dolphins. In some cases there were no examples
cayed teeth among modern humans in southwest- of cavities found in the species and in other cases
ern Asia during a roughly fifty thousand-year 25-30 percent of the skeletons of a given species
period of the Middle Paleolithic and reported had cavities.
the rate to be about two percent of teeth. The authors used the term “caries-like We clearly
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These figures are likely to be substantially lesions” in part because of controversy about do not require
underestimated because they do not take into whether animals with no dietary source of
account missing teeth. On the other hand, a “de- carbohydrates can truly develop dental caries. industrial
cayed and missing teeth” index would probably The diets of these dolphins generally consist of foods to suffer
overestimate the rate of decay if we assumed all marine foods such as fish, squid, and crustaceans. rampant
of the missing teeth to represent decayed teeth. Another paper from 2005 documented the
Quite often, skeletal remains include loose prevalence of tooth decay in skulls of rodents dental wear
teeth and not only whole skulls. In these cases, a related to the chinchilla and guinea pig collected and decay.

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