Researchers of a new study found that a starch rich diet may have been responsible for a higher rate of tooth decay among ancient hunter-gatherers, challenging the popular belief that dental disease was linked to the advent of farming.
University of Oxford researchers noticed widespread tooth decay in a hunter-gathering society in Morocco several thousand years before the dawn of agriculture.
For the study, they examined 52 sets of adult teeth from hunter-gatherer skeletons found in Taforalt in Morocco dating from 15,000 to13,700 years ago. To their surprise, they found decay in the teeth of all but three skeletons.
"This study reveals for the first time that at both ends of the Mediterranean, hunter-gatherers had started to eat a variety of different foods and were becoming more settled long before the advent of farming. It is clear changes happened on a very wide scale and we must now consider whether climate change was the major contributory factor," Professor Nick Barton of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Oxford said in a press statement.
Researchers also examined the charred fragments that were found during the excavation to identify plants that were carried back to the cave, including foods items such as acorns and pine nuts, and grasses that were used to make baskets.
The findings confirmed that hunter-gatherers often had cavities and tooth pains because of the food they ate. Researchers noted that these hunter-gatherers had edible acorns as a staple food, which led to a higher rate of cavities and tooth decays.
"The acorns may have been boiled or ground to make flour; cooking the acorns would have added to their stickiness, and abrasive particles from grindstones contributed to rapid tooth wear so that caries started to form on the roots of the teeth," lead researcher Dr Louise Humphrey, human origins researcher at the Natural History Museum, concluded.
So how did these hunter-gatherers deal with their oral health problems? A previous study showed that Neanderthals, a set of skilled hunter-gatherers used toothpicks to weaken pain caused by oral diseases like swelling of gums.
