A Neanderthal Had a Root Canal 50K+ Years Before Dentists

A single lower molar pulled from a Siberian cave just became the oldest evidence of medical intervention in the entire human evolutionary record. The dentist was a Neanderthal. The drill was a sharpened piece of jasper. The patient kept eating with that tooth afterward.

The roughly 59,000-year-old molar was recovered from Chagyrskaya Cave in what is now southwestern Russia. Researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences and the University of Arizona subjected the tooth, designated Chagyrskaya 64, to micro-CT scanning and optical microscopy, then ruled out every natural explanation for what they found: a large, smooth-walled concavity extending all the way into the pulp chamber. Fine parallel striations on the interior walls, consistent with a rotational drilling motion, pointed to deliberate intervention.

To test the hypothesis, the team fabricated pointed tools from jasper collected near the cave, using the same stone-knapping techniques available to Neanderthals, then drilled into three modern human molars. One researcher, Lydia Zotkina, contributed her own recently extracted wisdom tooth. The teeth were placed in small amounts of water to simulate mouth conditions and the tools were twisted by hand. The groove geometry matched. The concavity geometry matched. The case held.

What the procedure actually accomplished matters. Exposing the pulp and clearing the cavity's contents would have deadened the nerves and blood supply, ending the pain and likely resolving the infection. By clinical criteria, it worked. It predates the earliest evidence of modern humans drilling into cavities by roughly 40,000 years, and that earlier Homo sapiens attempt left significant infected tissue behind. This one did not.

Someone understood what was wrong, found the right tool and fixed it. Fifty-nine thousand years ago. In a cave. Without anesthesia.

Read the full story at The Guardian, May 13, 2026

Hot Take: The patient lived and ate and went on with their life. Someone cared enough to make that possible. Every time the field rewrites the Neanderthal story, it rewrites it in the same direction: toward us.