New evidence of dental pathology in 40,000-year-old neandertals

Abstract

The fossil remains from the Sima de las Palomas add to the small sample of caries lesions affecting Neandertals and reinforce the pattern of oral pathology that has been emerging for these late archaic humans. Alveolar lesions, ante mortem tooth loss, and orthodontic problems, as well as caries lesions, remain rare, in the context of high levels of occlusal and interproximal attrition, dental supereruption, and calculus accumulation. This implies a level of oral health rarely seen in more recent, sedentary human populations without routine dental care. As such, the Neandertal pattern, reinforced by the Palomas specimens, may provide a framework against which to view the abundant dentoalveolar abnormalities of recent human populations. This oral health pattern is accompanied by the abnormalities of the Palomas 59 second molar. As with a number of both Neandertal (Trinkaus, 1983; Fennell and Trinkaus, 1997) and early modern human (Formicola and Buzhilova, 2004; Trinkaus et al., 2006; Shang and Trinkaus, 2010) sets of lesions, the abnormalities are obvious, the proximate causes are sometimes apparent, but the ultimate etiologies remain obscure. Diagnosis is inhibited by incomplete fossil preservation, as with Palomas 59. Yet, these lesion patterns raise the issue of changing developmental and degenerative pathological patterns through human evolution. © 2011 International & American Associations for Dental Research.