New Evidence of Dental Pathology in 40,000-year-old Neandertals

unlike modern urban humans with a soft refined diet and consequent rampant dental pathology, especially dental caries and periodontal disease, dental and alveolar pathology was relatively rare in Pleistocene humans. This holds true for the Neandertals, who were contemporaneous with and immediately preceded modern humans in western Eurasia, between ~200,000 and ~35,000 years ago. Among Neandertals, the most general observations of the dentition are a high level of occlusal and interproximal attrition. The wear tended to be greater on the anterior teeth, frequently resulting in complete crown removal of some teeth by the fifth decade of life, and was accompanied by supereruption of the teeth (Trinkaus, 1983). Caries lesions have been documented (Lebel and Trinkaus, 2001), but they were extremely rare (4 out of > 1250 teeth, or ≈ 0.3%). Ante mortem tooth loss was present but rare, even in cases of marked occlusal attrition (Heim, 1976; Trinkaus, 1983, 1985). The few known alveolar abscesses were associated with severe attrition and/or ante mortem tooth loss (Heim, 1976; Trinkaus, 1985), and pathology of the mandibular body beyond alveolar lesions is unknown. Orthodontic problems included only premolar rotations (Rougier et al., 2006). It is in this context that we present dental pathological lesions in two Neandertal fossils from the Sima de las Palomas del Cabezo Gordo, southeastern Spain. This paper is not intended to be a conceptual advance, but it presents new data regarding the antiquity of human caries lesions and an unusual case of oral pathology.