Iceman Had Bad Teeth 130
sciencehabit writes "Europe's best-known mummy wasn't just a medical mess; he also had terrible teeth, according to a new study. Ötzi, a Stone Age man who died atop a glacier about 5300 years ago, suffered from severe gum disease and cavities. When Ötzi was discovered atop a glacier on the Austro-Italian border, his frozen corpse was intensively studied. But no one took a close look at his teeth until now. Using 3D computer tomography (a CAT scan), the hunter's mouth could be examined for clues as to the life he led. A fall or other accident killed one of his front teeth, still discolored millennia later. And he may have had a small stone, gone unnoticed in his whole-grain bread or gruel, to thank for a broken molar. That gruel may be the culprit behind Ötzi's cavities and gum disease, too. The uptick in starches, the researchers suggest, could explain the increasing frequency of cavities in teeth from the time—a problem that's been with us ever since."
That's not a very nice thing to say (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, I'm not the biggest Val Kilmer fan around, but c'mon, that's just downright insulting!
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ONE comment, and you've already beaten me to the Val Kilmer joke...
So it was the first Val Kilmer post.
Top GNU (Score:5, Funny)
ONE comment, and you've already beaten me to the Val Kilmer joke...
Considering this is Slashdot, I'd have expected the obligatory joke "Iceman" reference to have been Spiderman and his Amazing Friends [youtube.com], not bloody Top Gun. I can't believe that I'm the first. Hand in your geek cards at once... >:-(
Anyway.... "Iceman had bad teeth? That's nothing, Firestar had BO and the other guy, er... could do what a spider can. Hang on, that last one's quite cool."
*ahem*
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv4c3flhSaU
Iceman Had Bad Teeth (Score:2)
From the No-Shit-Sherlock dept.
Or we're the cavities formed posthumously? (Score:2)
I'm no forensic expert, but wouldn't tooth decay continue after death? How are posthumous cavities differentiated from cavities formed during life?
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Hm. I'd imagine the conditions for culturing the related bacteria are pretty specific to a living host. The chemistry of the mouth, eating food, temperature, enclosed cavity (flesh of your face), etc.
Re:Or we're the cavities formed posthumously? (Score:4, Informative)
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Charlie Wilcox said it best [youtube.com]
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I'd say dying in the snow and being frozen for 5300 years helps with absolutely any problem whatsoever in the most permanent way (except for being frozen 5400 years).
Maybe he was British (Score:5, Funny)
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An American Ice Man would have had braces as a cave child.
Hence the cavities.
Not to mention his skin was really dehydrated. (Score:1)
Hah!
Report sponsored by the association of dentists (Score:1, Offtopic)
That's the inconvenient truth of "the simple life" (Score:3)
Dentists? Nope
Doctors? Nope
Nationwide medical coverage? Nope
Anesthetics? Nope
Rather Complicated Operations? Yes, surprisingly - but at full consciousness!
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Well, things can always be a little too simple, but that doesn't mean we should make them as complicated/not-simple/technological as possible. It's perfectly possible to have good health without being inundated with technology for our entire lives.
No actually it isn't. You just don't realise that: spoken language, currency, written language, specialized education, calendars, etc. are technology. Not to mention: stethoscopes, toothbrushes, anatomy, cell theory, germ theory, etc.
Good luck having a modern lifespan without a nontrivial subset of technology.
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Forget the article, you didn't even read the whole summary, I see. "The uptick in starches, the researchers suggest, could explain the increasing frequency of cavities in teeth from the time---a problem that's been with us ever since." In other words, tooth decay isn't caused by lack of dentists. It's caused by eating food that isn't the natural diet for human beings. Dentistry is only needed to fix a problem we've caused ourselves.
People didn't only live until 30. That statistic is an average: Infant morta
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But I suppose these are some of the myths you need to believe in, and propagate, to support "national health coverage." So by all means carry on.
I'm not even from the US.
(But where I live, we have "national health coverage", thank you.)
But it's true - corn-starches aren't very good for the overall health.
Nevertheless, teeth need a lot of attention - and sometimes a dentist.
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Hmm. What's that ... horse? ... bison? ... no ... bullshit.
US healthcare costs twice as much (per capita) as the UK and the outcome is the same.
I'll leave it up to you to figure out why and who is being fucked over by it.
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Please come to Poland and try visit a doctor then. Dissatisfaction guaranteed.
Re:That's the inconvenient truth of "the simple li (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a nice hypothesis. Now go for the hard data: look for countries with better life indexes and higher life expectancy than USA (yes, there's quite a lot of them). Now note down which one of them has NOT socialized medicine.
HINT: no one of them, not a single one.
Re:That's the inconvenient truth of "the simple li (Score:5, Interesting)
Every once in a while, you hear of some local government or some NGO sponsoring an expensive piece of equipment for a hospital, then even with judicious use the hospital runs out of the yearly cap by May, making that equipment gather dust.
While here in good ol free market USA, virtually all our major equipment in our small rural hospital has been purchased by funds from various NGOs because we don't have the right mix of patients to make money off the bizarre US system. To add insult to injury to 'the best medical system in the world', we have increasing problems with drug unavailability [fda.gov]. Nothing like a lack of sterile saline solution to kick your medicine back a couple hundred years.
The US system is failing on so many levels that it's pretty embarrassing.
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Instead of listing the richest folks who had access to the best of everything, how about you tell me how long the median farmer lived.
I suppose these are myths you need to support "Fuck you, I got mine." So by all means, carry on.
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Farming is actually a pretty healthy lifestyle. Lots of outdoor physical work, not cramped in with thousands of other people in cities, good rest periods after the harvest, plenty of food unless the crops fail, oh yes you could do worse than being a farmer.
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It seems those getting the crap beaten out of them could benefit from ready access to firearms. Having known a few people with ties to Papua New Guinea, I can affirm the merit of your statement and add weight to the veracity of my own. Even given the potential for intrusions by similarly armed aggressors, people tend to think twice about such acts when the potential to be shot dead is significant.
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The rich had access to food that was not rotting, did not starve, and water that was clean. For the vast majority of human history the amount and quality of food available varied greatly based on income and social standing.
Re:That's the inconvenient truth of "the simple li (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod parent up.
To compare the Romans to cavemen is an insult. Romans were extremely advanced for the time. The legions (when not fighting) could build damn near anything and could build it to last. Roman roads survived the middle ages with little to no maintenance and are still servicable today. Meanwhile, our roads quickly crumble and deteriorate without yearly maintenance. Roman aquaducts and sewers meant that cities had running water and decent sanitation (including flush toilets), something not seen again until the late 19th-20th century. After the collapse of Rome, Europe would spend the next 1800 years shitting in a bucket. Romans even had a primitive steam engine. It wasn't deployed much (if at all) outside of design drawings but a steam-powered vehicle could have been possible if the empire had lasted a bit longer.
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He likely did not have freedom of speech either. Was the great Washington perhaps lying?
What to eat, then? (Score:2)
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To avoid cavities, eat a meat diet. Eskimo's had 0 cavities on a pure meat diet, without brushing their teeth (no scurvy either).
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That's because they ate the fat and the whole animal, often in a poorly cooked fashion, not just the raw muscle. A diet of butter fried steak isn't going to save you from scurvy.
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But eating a liver will. Polar bear and seal liver is high in Vitamins C, D and A.
yummm. Liver.
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Bear liver can be poisonous, just because it has too high of a concentration of vitamins.
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Yes you are right, Eskimo's really enjoyed the fat of the animal, in combination with the muscle. You would die if you tried to just live off of the muscle. Fully cooking meat destroys some of the vitamins in it, so its better to eat it not fully cooked (pink on the inside). Eskimo's ate what we would call a high fat diet, consisting of about 70-80% fat.
A diet of seal fat and slightly boiled seal muscle will save you from scurvy :)
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Are there Eskimo's left that stick to their past diet?
From the book "Fat of the Land", published in the 1950's, the author gave me the impression that the Eskimo culture was increasingly being influenced by the American/European diets. I assumed that by now, the majority of Eskimo's would consume more carbs and less fat, than before. I may be mistaken though.
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Brush with a fluoride toothpaste at least once a day.
Then brush 1 or 2 additional times with a toothpaste containing Novamin. It is a remineralizing agent (your teeth will feel very smooth). I use Restore toothpaste, it's available on Amazon. There is a fluoride toothpaste that has Novamin, but I can't recall what it is.
Then floss a couple of times a day.
Keep some kit at work, be that strange person who brushes in the bathroom after lunch (the usual response is, "I should do that", but they never do)...
Ate gruel and bread (Score:1)
TFA mentions that he ate gruel and grains and that was probably to blame for his poor dental health. They're also blaming mechanical damage from tool holding and chewing sand with his gruel. I find it pretty unlikely that he would eat sandy gruel, they were prehistoric, not stupid. If they were stupid, we wouldn't have gotten the chance to be as stupid as we are as a race.
Re:Ate gruel and bread (Score:4, Funny)
TFA mentions that he ate gruel and grains and that was probably to blame for his poor dental health. They're also blaming mechanical damage from tool holding and chewing sand with his gruel. I find it pretty unlikely that he would eat sandy gruel, they were prehistoric, not stupid. If they were stupid, we wouldn't have gotten the chance to be as stupid as we are as a race.
Sandy gruel just means "stone ground".
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TFA mentions that he ate gruel and grains and that was probably to blame for his poor dental health. They're also blaming mechanical damage from tool holding and chewing sand with his gruel. I find it pretty unlikely that he would eat sandy gruel, they were prehistoric, not stupid. If they were stupid, we wouldn't have gotten the chance to be as stupid as we are as a race.
Sandy gruel just means "stone ground".
Why do people think this is funny? People have been using millstones and similar devices to grind grain since long before Ötzi. "Stone ground" isn't just some sort of trendy elitist affectation, it was basically all you had until the development of milling equipment that didn't shed parts of itself into the grain.
But thanks for the votes, anyway!
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TFA mentions that he ate gruel and grains and that was probably to blame for his poor dental health. They're also blaming mechanical damage from tool holding and chewing sand with his gruel. I find it pretty unlikely that he would eat sandy gruel, they were prehistoric, not stupid. If they were stupid, we wouldn't have gotten the chance to be as stupid as we are as a race.
I think if you have nothing but stone to work with getting sand in your gruel is pretty much unavoidable.
You have only yourself to blame, Otzi (Score:2)
Bet he still regrets missing all those dental appointments.
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Re:Why so slow? (Score:4, Funny)
He was found 22 years ago. It took that long to examine his teeth?
He was afraid of dentists. It's quite a primeval phobia, you know.
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Your assumption about unrefined foods is incorrect, Look up the teeth of the Indians and Eskimo's before they were "civilized". From what I've read, eating a meat diet, or one that included some vegetables, didn't have cavities. Cavities seem to be associated with the consumption of sugar and starches.
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In fact having "bad teeth" may increase your chance of passing on your DNA because you do not waste time kissing.
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Re:Evolution (Score:4, Interesting)
in other news (Score:1)
Thanks for the lazy news.
It's not even news, really. It's just observation. Like walking outside during a thunderstorm, then printing: "New Discovery: Rain Soaks Your Clothes." Or "Ninjas Love Pork Rinds."
And Cyclops had bad eyes. (Score:2)
Ah, these Europeans... (Score:2, Funny)
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You have bad teeth, and BO. The combination cancels out the hot.
All these posts and no archeologists yet? (Score:2)
You can date the introduction of agriculture in a population by the age of the skulls with cavities. No agriculture = no cavities. This is not news; fermentable carbohydrates rot your teeth.
I'm a dentist. I don't know about the cause (Score:2)
of the cavities, but having periodontal problems is one of the hallmark signs of scurvy- a vitamin C deficiency. It is plausible that he didn't have a source of vitamin C in his diet.
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Re:Paleo diet (Score:4, Insightful)
Grain. Hardly paleo.
Re:Paleo diet (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Paleo diet (Score:5, Informative)
Or maybe, just maybe living in a predental hygiene era might have had something to do with it.
Both. He lived after the invention of flour and before the invention of toothbrush. That was a very unfortunate period for everyone's teeth.
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Theory is that Ötzi was murdered. Now we know he was murdered because he was Europe's first vegan and couldn't STFU about it.
What an idiot.
Re:Paleo diet (Score:4, Informative)
The summary contains almost the entire FA. But there is this...
In the late Stone Age, humans were increasingly incorporating coarsely ground grain into their diets. The uptick in starches, the researchers suggest, could explain the increasing frequency of cavities in teeth from the time—a problem that's been with us ever since.
In other words, it was no longer the "Paleo diet" and a shift away from it is what brought about bad oral health.
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How do we even know this "Paleo diet" would cause one to have good oral health?
The whole "Paleo diet" reeks of silly Noble Savage crap to me.
Re:Paleo diet (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Paleo diet (Score:4, Informative)
One of the problems with claiming what "the" paleo diet consisted of is that it varied hugely from time to time and place to place.
Unsurprisingly, the world before "the" invention of agriculture was not a giant homogeneous culture with the same diet everywhere.
For the most part, diets in the winter vs summer were remarkably different, even for the same people. There are many exceptions, though, where the diet didn't vary much year round.
Even the diets from places as close together as, say, western Oregon and Utah from 13,000 years ago were hugely different. The Pleistocene Oregon diet consisted of large amounts of seafood, rabbits, tubers, and, yes, lots of wild grains. In Utah there was significantly more larger game, more meat, including more fat, different berries, more grains and less tubers.
And, yes, even without lots of grains, throughout the archaeological record, people frequently had bad teeth. Worn flat by sand and bits of dirt in their food the was rule, not the exception, and cavities and abscesses were more common than not throughout the Americas. I imagine it would be similar to Europe and Africa.
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My point was that with the more varied pre-agricultural diet tooth decay was considerably less common. There were no shortage of dental problems, especially among peoples who chewed skins to soften them or for whom marrow bones was a large part of the diet, but
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Subsequent to the establishment of agriculture in the Middle East dental disease became a major cause of death
Ramesses II might have died of dental infection. I don't think he had a single healthy tooth in his mouth. The gritty Egyptian flour with an admixture of sand (which is sort of difficult to avoid in Egypt!) didn't help any.
Of course, the problems with agricultural nutrition were many-fold: pollen analysis of the layers found in Jarmo and other places suggests that the range of plants consumed dropped from about two hundred to mere eight or so, leading to malnutrition, decreased stature, lots of developmenta
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Consider how many wild animals brush their teeth.
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They tend to have terrible teeth.
Abscesses are not exactly an unknown cause of death for wild animals.
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How do we even know this "Paleo diet" would cause one to have good oral health?
It's called paleopathology. That's how we know.
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Please offer some more information.
How large a sample size do we possibly have?
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Specifically, A shift to what we continue to use for the most part today.
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So that's what a Paleo diet gets you... terrible teeth. Seriously, thank science for all we have!
Wrong.
his whole-grain bread or gruel, to thank for a broken molar. That gruel may be the culprit behind Ötzi's cavities and gum disease, too. The uptick in starches, the researchers suggest, could explain the increasing frequency of cavities in teeth from the time—a problem that's been with us ever since.
Paleo diets don't have grains in them.
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Admitting you're wrong and apologizing for it? This must be some fancy troll business.
Re:Nationality ID'd (Score:5, Informative)
Last I read the British have better dental hygiene than us Americans do. They're just not as fixated on the bleaching and such.
And before some horse's ass drags out the new "i'm confused by your 'americans' reference", I meant the US.