A song of ice and teeth...

Around 5000 years ago, a middle-aged man died in a mountain pass located in what was to become the border between Austria and Italy. He was quickly buried by ice and remained there until he was discovered in 1991. Initially thought to be the remains of a deceased mountaineer, he soon became known as Europe's earliest natural mummy, christened 'Ötzi' by his discovers.

'ice to meet you. Ötzi the 'Ice Man' currently resides at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Italy

Although the remains of this remarkably well-preserved Neolithic man have been scanned, tested and analysed regularly since his discovery, it is only recently that his mouth has been systematically assessed.

University of Zurich researchers have looked at high resolution 3-D scans of the 'Ice Man' and the results suggest that problems with his dental health may have added to his already long list of ailments (poor Ötzi had broken ribs, arthritis, parasitic worms, gall bladder stones and had probably died having taken an arrow to the shoulder.)

CT scan of Otzi. Note how flat the tooth line is - a sure sign of dental wear.
Photo courtesy of the University of Zurich.

His teeth were extremely worn down, from a tough and gritty diet. Dental wear isn't something a lot of modern populations have to contend with - but Ötzi had lost about two-thirds of the height of most of his teeth. This wasn't the only thing wearing him down* though. His tough diet had also contributed to some tooth chipping, caused by small stones in his food, a 'dietary accident' according to the researchers.

Ötzi was found to have had at least two cavities, one of which was so extensive it had penetrated the nerve containing pulp cavity within the tooth. The team from Zurich also noted a great deal of change and loss to the bone around the tooth sockets, indicating a moderate to severe level of periodontal (gum) disease.

It is not unusual to find these kind of dental conditions in such an individual. Tooth-brushing isn't thought to have been happened much in Europe in the stone age and although Ötzi was found with numerous tools and equipment - a toothbrush was, unsurprisingly, not found amongst his belongings.






* Sorry. I couldn't resist.

For more information, see:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eos.12037/abstract;jsessionid=234243E97FE307DEA5A30EF7477683A8.d03t03

Kissing a donkey and spitting on a frog!

In the throes of agonising toothache, could you imagine kissing the teeth of a living donkey in an attempt to cure yourself? If you can't, that's understandable - but it's exactly what you would have done in the 14th century... and much more besides.

The cures for toothache in the past are difficult to believe and some of them are difficult to stomach. From spitting into the mouth of frog in the hope it would take on your pain for itself to sucking on the freshly extracted tooth of a dead man, past populations would try anything to alleviate the pain of cavities and gum disease.

Until the germ theory of disease was discovered in the late 19th century, how teeth became cavity ridden was a mystery. In 1890, WD Miller discovered that bacteria lived on the surface of the teeth and their acidic waste products could erode the enamel. Prior to this discovery, common lore attributed cavities to a tooth worm. The worm was a popular explanation for dental problems across the globe throughout the ages.  Ancient Babylonian priests are purported to have called upon the sun god Ra to summon the worm for them so that they could banish it with a curse and medieval Europeans would try to smoke the worms out by taking in the (poisonous) fumes of henbane.

Here be monsters: tooth worms and eternal suffering.

Animals, as with many folk cures, lose out in this situation, with common traditional cures for toothache in England including: wearing a necklace made of mole paws and noses, cutting spines off a dogfish or rubbing the afflicted teeth with the burnt brain of a hare or the horn of a hart. Apparently, hare brains rubbed into the gums were also used to aid the safe eruption of infants' teeth. Lovely.

Nineteenth century Americans would even bite snakes, including deadly rattlesnakes, in an attempt to get rid of their toothache. I'm pretty sure that the threat of getting bitten by a rattler would definitely take your mind off the tooth pain, so at least this one might have worked for a short time...




References:
The Teeth in Folklore (1968), Jeri Tanner
Folklore of the Teeh (1934), Leo Kanner
Of the Teeth  (1961), Byrd Howell Granger

Dental heath, dental care and dementia

Regularly cleaning your teeth and keeping your gums healthy could help lower your risk of succumbing to dementia later in life, according to a recent US study.

Researchers at the University of California collected health data regarding the dental health and dental habits of over 5000 individuals living in a large retirement community over a period of 18 years. The participants of the study were all dementia free at the outset of the study in 1992, and of them, around 27% were diagnosed with dementia by 2010.

The results were interesting. The individuals with teeth, who did not brush their teeth daily were up to 65% more likely to develop dementia than those who brushed multiple times a day - although this link was only statistically significant in women. Not visiting the dentist regularly (i.e. a lack of dental upkeep and supervision) was also associated with an increased dementia risk.

Although this study is limited and does not establish an explicit causal link between dental health and dementia, it could suggest that 'retaining adequate masticatory function through regular oral hygiene and use of dentures may reduce risk of dementia' (Paganini-Hill et al. 2012), with further studies required to identify exactly how and why dental health and dementia are connected.

There are certainly mechanisms by which such a link could exist. For example, the brains of Alzheimer sufferers have been found to contain more species of the oral Treponema bacteria than the brains of control groups. This may indicate that it is partly or occasionally the inflammatory responses of the body and brain to these pathogens which are responsible for illness.

In the context of the ever-ageing populations of the developed world, it's probably a good call to investigate the associations between dental and overall health - after all, keeping an elderly population in tip-top mental shape might be as simple as promoting a holistic approach to health - which includes regular tooth brushing!







Paganini-Hill, A. et al. 2012. Dentition, Dental Health Habits, and Dementia: The Leisure World Cohort Study. In the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Volume 60, Issue 8. 
Available here. 

Plaque and pollen and proteins, oh my!

Do you often wonder what interesting things might be lurking in your mouth when you don't brush your teeth? 

Well, wonder no more! This very interesting interview in the Guardian with Christina Warinner at the Centre for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich discusses exactly that. Warinner talks about deposits of dental plaque (what we call dental calculus) on teeth and how 'pollen, starch grains, animal muscle, bacteria, even a person's DNA' can be found trapped within it.

If you get a chance, you can watch Warinner's TED talk on YouTube (linked below), which is similarly fascinating and explains how teasing out the preserved protein and DNA from dental calculus can be used to 'investigate the relationship between disease, diet and the environment' in the past - and how that knowledge might benefit us in the future.

A Morbid Taste For Teeth

Police in Austria have recently launched a manhunt for a grave-robber with a predilection for removing teeth and dentures from crypts and coffins in the Viennese General Cemetery.

Although grave desecration is not an uncommon crime, the manner in which the perpetrator has gone about doing such a thing is a little less cloak and dagger than normal - he's apparently filmed himself opening up tombs and using pliers to remove the teeth. The composers Johann Strauss and Johannes Brahms are two of the better known victims of this not so covert dental extraction.

The Belgian media have named this individual as Ondrej Jajcaj and it would appear, from a quick perusal of his Facebook account that they might be right. Here he is in his profile picture, with a skull on a stick and a pair of pliers.

Figure 1: Ondrej Jajcaj, courtesy of his own Facebook page.
Yep. Totally normal.

Further examination of his profile reveals a 'miscellaneous' photo folder, similar to one that you or I might have, with the only difference being the sheer quantity of dental artefacts and human remains he has in there... (although it is nice to see that even grave-robbers have a fun side though. Look at him being adorable with that goat!)

Figure 2: A Facebook screen-capture. Note all the dentures and
dental fixtures. They're all pretty vintage, they are.
Wonder where they came from.

Not content with Facebook, I poked a little bit more and found his Youtube account which features a whole host of videos that I can't possibly understand, many of which show him wandering through abandoned graveyards. The video that I found most fascinating however is the ominously titled 'Gold treasure in the woods' which has him beside a tree talking about a box of gold dentures and fillings (see below) and subsequently, fragments of actual human jaw and dental instruments.

Figure 3: A half buried tin of gold teeth.
We all have one of those, right?

Figure 4: I wish I could speak Slovakian, just to
have the faintest idea what's going on here.

On what might be his website there is reference to how Jajcaj wants his amassed collection of historic dental prosthetics to be put in a museum - which he admits might not be easy since the prosthetics were from 'old abandoned graves that he illegally investigated.' His motivation is something to do with Slovakia being a Catholic country and how science triumphs over religion - but I'm not really sure exactly what he's getting at.


Jajcaj's actions are of concern. It is certainly out of the norm behaviourally - how many people regularly take topless pictures of themselves with grave-robbed spoils? But from an archaeological point of view, it is also horrible. The acts of desecration are clearly destructive, ruining the context and meaning of his 'finds'. This makes them completely pointless objects, collected for collections sake alone and at least a little for the simple gratification of an individual who thinks taking pictures like this is appropriate...

Figure 5: So many things wrong with this picture.
Again, courtesy of Ondrej Jajcaj's Facebook.

(But at least I know now that there is someone in the world more fascinated by teeth than me. Phew.)