It must have been agony. Two million years ago, an early human likely once tossed and turned, unable to sleep as the front of their mouth throbbed incessantly. Their teeth were worn down so much that root canals had been exposed. And above the upper incisors lay at least one dental abscess – a mass of pus growing inside the jaw, caused by bacterial infection.
Of course, there were no dentists to relieve the pain. It is possible the individual may even have eventually died from blood poisoning caused by the troublesome abscess.
This is the sorry situation revealed by new analysis of a rare hominin specimen, in 1969. Researchers recently inspected around 20 early human jaw fossils from southern Africa and in one, SK 847 – the specific species of the individual is disputed.
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The find may be the earliest dental abscess in the genus Homo ever found, though there is one other jaw bone of a similar age from Europe that also has signs of abscess-like formations.
SK 847 definitely suffered from the condition, says  in the UK, as it has a small rim around a hole in the upper jaw.
“That’s where the bone started to remodel where the abscess had been,” he says. “I knew straightaway that that one had formed during life.”
The abscess appears to have been caused by bacteria attacking the individual’s teeth. The teeth themselves were probably worn down after eating hard, uncooked food that – thanks to a lack of culinary hygiene – may also have carried grit into the mouth.
It is unlikely the early human would simply have tried to ignore the abscess pain, says , the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona, Spain. Ancient cultures are known to have used plants – SK 847 may have used similar remedies, though there is no specific evidence to suggest this.
Although SK 847 has been studied before, the evidence of an abscess was probably missed because anatomists don’t commonly identify all the dental conditions visible in early hominin fossils, says Bernard Wood at George Washington University in Washington DC.
He adds, however, that he for one has noticed how some early hominin jawbones often look “ragged”, perhaps as a consequence of gum disease.
bioRxiv
