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

Wearing your teeth on your sleeve?

One thing I have noticed in the last few years of my self-imposed tooth obsession, is how often teeth get used for art and decoration. On this occasion, it is the glitter encrusted pop princess Ke$ha, famous for brushing her gold plated gnashers with Jack Daniels, who is re-appropriating teeth.

Last year the 25 year old singer put out a Twitter based request for each of her three million fans to send her some of their unwanted teeth and even provided a PO Box for them to do so. As is the way of crazed fans, she received thousands of teeth in the mail.

And the reason? Frivolous accessories, of course! Ke$ha made the donated teeth into a bra-top, a headdress, necklaces and earrings. According to this interview with MTV she's even worn the outfit out, proving that not only are teeth essential to human health and wellbeing, but they're fashionable too.

Ke$ha's dentists get angry when she continues to ignore their advice to
stop using alcohol to brush her teeth and to start using a fluoride toothpaste.

Beeswax and broken teeth...

Going to the dentist for a filling is generally considered to be a modern invention - but a 6500 year old jaw fragment found in Slovenia may be about to change that idea.

The unassuming fragment of mandible was excavated from a cave in the early 20th century, catalogued and filed away in an Italian museum until it was reinvestigated by Claudio Tuniz and Federico Bernardini of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, who were using samples from the museum to test new x-ray imaging techniques. Once the mandible fragment had been scanned however, an unusual substance was noticed adhering to the surface of a canine tooth.

The Lonche Jaw; part of the lower left dental arcade
belonging to a 6500 year old human. Scale bar 10mm.
Photo from doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044904.g001

High resolution scans revealed a long vertical crack in the tooth and an exposed area of dentine - the material that sits beneath enamel in the tooth - with this other substance covering the occlusal (biting) surface of the tooth and filling the crack.

Further tests of the filling material discovered that it was beeswax, and subsequent radiocarbon dating found that it was contemporary with the mandible. Although it is possible that the beeswax was applied just after death as part of a ritual, it seems likely that the wax was acting as a filling to numb dental pain. If this is the case, it represents one of the earliest examples of dental-palliative care. Beeswax, which can have anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory properties was known and used by prehistoric populations, and it is not inconceivable that this kind of dental care was at least sporadically practised.

It is interesting to wonder about how many more examples of such dental care exist in museums across the globe - after all, this particular mandible fragment lay filed away for 101 years before the beeswax addition was noticed...



References:
Bernardini et al  2012 'Beeswax as Dental Filling on a Neolithic Human Tooth' in PLOS ONE.
Barras, C 2012 'Oldest dental filling is found in a Stone Age tooth' in New Scientist Online

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. 

Teeth where teeth should not be...

After 23 years of abnormal swelling in her left eye, Nagabhushanam Siva decided to let doctors in Chennai, southern India investigate her condition.  A tumour was diagnosed and an operation was undertaken, only to reveal the presence of two fully formed teeth within the tumour itself. Unfortunately, the tumour had been in place for too long, placing pressure on the optic nerve and leaving it permanently damaged - thus the operation was not successful, leaving Siva blind.

Teeth in the tumour, seen during surgery.
(Cover Asia Press)

This kind of tumour is usually present from birth and is called a 'mature teratoma'*. Disturbingly, they can contain all sorts of misplaced tissue - including hair, teeth and bone. In some cases, the growth can include even more complex organs. As I discovered with not a small amount of horror that such a thing as an 'mature ovarian cystic teratoma' can exist. This is often a mass of disorganised tissue within the ovarian region, but can occasionally form into a 'homunculus' with a generalised human form. In one case study from Japan, such a tumour was found to have 'Brain, eye, spinal nerve, ear, teeth, thyroid gland, bone, bone marrow, gut, trachea, blood vessels, and phallic' tissue (Kuno et al. 2003), arranged in a 'well organised' fashion.

Although such tumours are rare, they contain skeletal and dental tissues which could very well survive in archaeological contexts. A brief search of the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology hasn't turned up any clear examples of such a condition in the past, but I think they could be out there. It's certainly something to keep in mind next time I find some teeth where teeth really shouldn't be...




* Wikipedia informs me that a benign tumour of this nature, in the UK is termed a 'mature teratoma', whilst in the US it's simply referred to as a teratoma. In the UK, a 'teratoma' or 'immature teratoma' refers to a malignant tumour.

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.)