This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: More than 6,500 years ago, someone carefully drilled a hole in a human tooth, strung it on a cord and likely used it as a necklace. Found during field surveys at the Vinča cultural site of Jablanica in Serbia, the human tooth was originally misidentified as an animal tooth bead until archaeologist Nemanja Marković and his colleague Ana Maričić took a closer look.
The researchers now believe this was no bead at all, but a piece of jewelry taken from the remains of someone long dead, and the only reliably documented human tooth ornament ever reported in the Neolithic central Balkans. "My first reaction was curiosity rather than surprise," Marković, archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology in Belgrade, said. Once he recognized the shape of a human canine, "it became clear that we were looking at something much more unusual than an ordinary tooth bead." The tooth described in a new study published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology was found at the Neolithic village of Jablanica, just south of Belgrade.
Jablanica was part of the Vinča culture, one of Europe's largest prehistoric societies. Since the site's discovery in the late 1800s, it has produced a myriad of pottery, figurines and carefully carved bone tools. The tooth, a tiny thing measuring just under an inch (23 mm), was found lying in a field; years of agricultural activity had taken their toll, and the tooth's crown had split in two.
The fragments were picked up and taken to the Museum of Mladenovac, where they were labeled as the remains of a bead and left on a shelf for nearly two decades. As the tooth lacked context, Marković and Maričić had to do some detective work to determine how old the deceased was and when the tooth was made. To pin that down, they combined various lines of evidence, including visual inspection, microscopy and X-ray analysis.
Wear on the tooth's chewing surface suggested it came from a middle-aged adult, while the smooth, undamaged surface of the tooth root hinted that it hadn't been yanked out while its owner was still alive. Rather, whoever it belonged to had long since perished, likely leaving behind nothing more than some skeletonized remains. Trying to figure out when the tooth was made was trickier.
For this, the researchers looked to another piece of jewelry found at Jablanica, a shell bracelet securely dated to around 4700 B.C. They compared the drill marks on the two objects, trying to determine whether any similarities suggested the same technique had been used to make both ornaments. According to Marković, each line of evidence pointed toward the same period, even if "absolute certainty is not possible" for a surface find.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
