Level 1 — Absolute Beginner
Long ago, a Neanderthal had a bad tooth. The tooth hurt a lot. Someone helped him with a small stone tool.
Scientists found this tooth in a cave in Russia. The cave is called Chagyrskaya. The tooth is very, very old. It is about 59,000 years old.
The scientists looked at the tooth with a big camera. They saw small marks inside. They think the marks come from a drill.
This is the oldest tooth fix in history. It shows that Neanderthals were smart. They could help each other when they were sick.
- tooth
- one of the white things in your mouth
- cave
- a big empty space in a hill or rock
- hurt
- to feel pain
- old
- from a long time ago
- stone
- a hard piece of rock
- drill
- a tool that makes a hole
- scientist
- a person who studies the world
- smart
- able to think very well
Level 2 — Elementary
Scientists in Russia have found something amazing. They studied a Neanderthal tooth from a cave called Chagyrskaya in the Altai Krai region of Siberia. The tooth is about 59,000 years old.
When the team looked at the tooth with a powerful microscope, they saw tiny grooves inside a big hole. The grooves look like they were made by a small tool. The scientists think this is the earliest sign of dentistry in human history.
The study was published in the journal PLOS One on May 13, 2026. The lead authors are Alisa Zubova and Lydia Zotkina from the Russian Academy of Sciences. They believe that a Neanderthal used a sharp stone to drill into the tooth and clean it.
To test the idea, the team made a tool from jasper, a hard local stone. They drilled into modern teeth in a lab and saw the same kind of marks. This means a tool-using Neanderthal could have done the same job 59,000 years ago.
- groove
- a long, thin line cut into a surface
- microscope
- a tool that makes very small things look big
- jasper
- a hard, smooth kind of stone
- dentistry
- the work of taking care of teeth
- Siberia
- a very cold part of northern Russia
- journal
- a magazine where scientists share their work
- cavity
- a hole in a tooth from disease
- infection
- an illness caused by tiny living things in the body
Level 3 — Intermediate
On May 13, 2026, researchers from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences published a study in PLOS One that may rewrite the history of medicine. They argue that a 59,000-year-old Neanderthal molar from Chagyrskaya Cave, in the Altai mountains of Russia, shows clear evidence of a deliberate dental procedure.
The lead authors, Alisa Zubova and Lydia Zotkina, used high-resolution scans to examine a large, unusual depression in the lower left second molar. Inside the cavity, they identified a pattern of microscopic rotational grooves that did not match natural wear from chewing or accidental fractures. The grooves were concentrated near the pulp chamber — the soft, nerve-rich centre of the tooth.
To test whether a Stone Age tool could have produced such marks, the team replicated jasper drills like those already known from Chagyrskaya and applied them to modern teeth under controlled conditions. In less than an hour, they recreated grooves that closely matched the ancient pattern. The experiment suggests that a Neanderthal could have removed infected tissue from the cavity to relieve pain.
If the interpretation holds, the find pushes back the earliest known dental intervention by more than 40,000 years and adds to growing evidence that Neanderthals practiced sophisticated medical care. The team plans to compare the Chagyrskaya tooth with other late-Neanderthal remains from Siberia and Europe in search of similar marks.
- molar
- a large flat tooth at the back of the mouth used for chewing
- pulp chamber
- the soft inner part of a tooth containing nerves and blood vessels
- rotational
- moving in a circle around a central point
- replicate
- to make or do something again in exactly the same way
- intervention
- an action taken to change a situation, especially in medicine
- Stone Age
- a very early period in human history when tools were made from stone
- wear
- the gradual damage caused by long use
- sophisticated
- complex and showing a lot of skill or thought
Level 4 — Advanced
A paper appearing on May 13, 2026 in PLOS One may force a substantial rethinking of when therapeutic dentistry first emerged in the hominin record. Researchers from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences report that a Neanderthal lower-left second molar recovered from Chagyrskaya Cave in Altai Krai bears the hallmarks of a deliberate intervention to address advanced dental caries roughly 59,000 years ago.
Using micro-computed tomography and scanning electron microscopy, lead authors Alisa V. Zubova and Lydia V. Zotkina mapped a constellation of striations within an atypical cavity penetrating to the pulp chamber. The microtraces describe arcuate, rotational pathways concentrated along the cervical margin of the lesion — a geometry not predicted by attritional wear, post-mortem taphonomy, or known patterns of bruxism, but consistent with a fine-pointed implement being twisted under pressure.
The team's experimental archaeology programme reinforced the diagnosis. Replicating perforators from locally sourced jasper — a raw material already documented in the Chagyrskaya assemblage — the researchers were able to evacuate carious dentine and reach the pulp in roughly forty minutes on modern molars. The resulting striation profile matched the ancient specimen on multiple morphometric axes, supporting the inference that a Mousterian-period operator engaged in targeted soft-tissue removal rather than incidental damage.
Methodologically, the finding extends a thickening line of evidence — from Shanidar burials to El Sidrón pharmacopoeia — that late Neanderthals possessed substantial therapeutic awareness. It also predates the Mehrgarh dental drillings of the Neolithic by more than fifty millennia. The authors are cautious about generalising from a single tooth, and have proposed a wider survey of Middle and Upper Palaeolithic dentitions across Eurasia to test whether dental intervention was an isolated act of ingenuity or part of a broader caregiving tradition.
- hominin
- any species in the human evolutionary lineage, including modern humans, Neanderthals, and our extinct relatives
- caries
- the technical term for tooth decay caused by bacteria
- micro-computed tomography
- a high-resolution 3D X-ray imaging technique used for very small objects
- striation
- a small, parallel groove or scratch on a surface
- taphonomy
- the study of how organisms decay and become preserved as fossils
- Mousterian
- a stone-tool culture associated with Neanderthals in Europe and western Asia
- morphometric
- relating to the measurement of form, shape, or size
- Palaeolithic
- the Old Stone Age, the earliest and longest period of stone-tool use
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