This Prehistoric Trick Shows How Ice Age People Harvested Teeth for Jewelry

By assembling the cultural practices of ancient humans, traditional archaeologists are based on artifact clues such as tools, bones and pottery. Experimental archaeologists, however, go further, by creating past behaviors to discover the way people formerly lived.

This is precisely what a team of researchers recently did to study how communities of the Stone Age in northeast Europe extracted animal teeth to produce accessories. Directed by Aija Macāne, an guest scholar from the Cultures Department of the University of Helsinki, archaeologists have personally tested seven different extraction methods to determine which were the most effective and the most effective. Their results, published on June 20 in the journal Archaeological and anthropological sciencesOffer new perspectives on the life of prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

“Our experiences show that dental extraction was a deliberate and sensitive process integrated into daily life, in particular cooking practices”, Macāne said in a university declaration. “This questions the hypothesis that the teeth used for ornaments were simply recovered or easily available.”

According to the researchers, animal teeth were among the most common materials used to make jewelry, accessories and other personal ornaments during the Stone Age, especially in the northern hemisphere. Experts know this thanks to sites like Zvejnieki, funeral land in northern Latvia where hunter-gatherers have put people to rest for about five millennia, from 7,500 to 2,600 BCE. More than 2,000 animal teeth have been excavated from Zvejnieki’s graves, making it a privileged location to study how ancient humans interacted with these materials.

Archaeologists have studied in -depth animal teeth pendants of this site, investigating the species from which they come, how they were used, where they were placed inside the tombs and how they were manufactured. However, much less studies have examined the process of extracting the teeth and the physical traces that it leaves behind, notes the researchers.

To fill this knowledge lake, Macāne and his colleagues dirty their hands – literally. The team made a series of experiences to test seven different prehistoric methods to extract the teeth: cut, percussion (or strike), drying in the air, soaking, direct heat and two cooking techniques. They chose these techniques based on previous archaeological and ethnographic research. “Although other methods can be tested, we argue that these seven are most likely given the technologies available at the moment,” said researchers in their report.

During a year, they experienced what it was to be human age humans who need a bling with the full teeth. The researchers conducted their experiences at the īdeņa experimental center in eastern Latvia, which enabled them to obtain the necessary raw materials of the approved local hunters. In total, they used seven skulls or mandibles from the Eurasian Wapiti, two from the wild boar and two from Roe Deer.

Of all the methods they tested, the two cooking techniques have been the most effective. Boil a mandible in a ceramic jar not only poache meat, but caused detachment of the soft tissues of the bone, which facilitates manual teeth extraction. Place whole skulls inside an earth oven – a fixed pit used to trap heat and, in this case, steam foods – had the same effect.

The two methods allowed high extraction rates without damaging the teeth, with the additional bonus to prepare a meal and make the rest of the bones adapted to the manufacture of tools. These results suggest that the extraction of the teeth can have been integrated into wider cultural practices, the fusion of food preparation, the manufacture of personal orders and funeral rituals.

As for the other techniques, the soaking turned out to be successful, but did not offer additional advantages. Cutting or hitting the teeth to remove them also worked, but this often causes damage. The last two methods – drying and application of direct heat – have not given successful results.

“Although this study was mainly concentrated on the assembly of the dental pendant of the Zvejnieki cemetery, our results have wider implications to understand the extraction of teeth and the production of pendants through prehistoric times,” said the researchers. “By examining the techniques used for the extraction of teeth, we have acquired valuable information on human behavior and cultural practices during stone age.”

However, questions remain. The researchers hope that their study will inspire other archaeologists to seek physical traces of the process of extraction on the artifacts of animal teeth. They also highlight the importance of studying the teeth of other species, including humans and dogs. Such work, according to them, would bring “critical light on the complexity and meaning of these practices”.