Having a dental cavity is dreadful. The anxiety and cost of dealing with it can be significant. Our species has been trying to repair tooth decay for thousands of years.
Even Swedish vikings struggled with painful dental problems and evidence of dental diseases has been discovered that dates back to the tenth through twelfth Century CE in a church in Sweden, as described in a survey published December 13 in PLOS ONE.
“I think both dental caries and other dental diseases are very relatable,” Carolina Bertilsson, a survey co-creator and dentist at the College of Gothenburg in Sweden, tells PopSci. “It’s horrible to think about the suffering that some of those people with decay, tooth extractions, and infections had to endure, without any of the modern dentistry practices we have today.”
The tooth were uncovered during a 2005 excavation of a Christian church in present-day Skara, Sweden. The nearby cemetery contained thousands of Viking graves, and a team from the College of Gothenburg examined tooth belonging to 171 individuals. The team used radiography to capture detailed images of the teeth and physically examined them.
60 percent of the adult remains showed signs of tooth decay and there were traces of tooth infection. Signs were also found that some teeth had been lost before death. Many of the people likely suffered from severe tooth decay and showed signs of attempted dental treatments. One person even showed signs of filed front teeth, similar to those found in other Swedish Viking remains, indicating that they may have been attempting unorthodox treatments.
“It appears that the Vikings tried to file their teeth to ease the pain from infected teeth,” says Bertilsson.
The coarseness of the food and high intake of starch mixed with the lack of dental care partly explain the tooth decay, among other factors. For more details, read more about it.
Left: Evidence that the person picked at their teeth, presumably to keep them clean. (CREDIT: Carolina Bertilsson).