Oldest tooth filling may have been found

We all know the drill: Slip up on your regular brush-and-floss routine, and you may end up at the dentist's office with a cavity that needs to be filled. But what people did about their toothaches thousands of years ago?

Scientists in Italy have discovered what may be the earliest evidence of therapeutic dentistry performed on a human.

A study published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One reports the discovery of a beeswax filling on the left canine of a 6,500-year-old human jawbone from Slovenia. It is housed at the Natural History Museum of Trieste, Italy.

"It was extremely difficult for somebody to identify the dentistry work by naked eye or simple tools," Federico Bernardini and Claudio Tuniz, the study's main coordinators, said in an e-mail to CNN. "In fact, the mandible [jawbone] remained in the museum for 101 years without somebody noticing anything strange on the canine."

This jawbone was originally found partially embedded in calcite on the wall of a cave near the village of Lonche.

The beeswax on the surface of the tooth was discovered by chance while the scientists were testing their analytical methods.

They estimated the age of the beeswax with a large ion accelerator for radiocarbon dating. They also used a type of particle accelerator called a synchrotron to get a high-resolution, 3-D image of the tooth.

The study concluded that beeswax was applied to the tooth shortly before or after the individual's death, but they do not know which.

If the person was alive while the tooth was filled, the beeswax was likely intended to "relieve tooth sensitivity" resulting from exposed dentine or the pain of chewing on a cracked tooth, the study authors wrote.

Bernardini and Tuniz pointed out that the earliest "practice of dentistry was discovered some years ago in a 9,000-year-old graveyard in Pakistan, but there was no evidence of tooth filling."

The new discovery "is the most ancient evidence of dentistry during the Neolithic in Europe and the earliest known direct example of therapeutic dental filling," Bernardini and Tuniz wrote.

Scientists do not know whether therapeutic dentistry was widely practiced in Neolithic Europe.