By Aylin Woodward

If you think dental surgery is painful today, just imagine getting a Neanderthal root canal.

New research on an ancient tooth discovered in a Siberian cave indicates that Neanderthals, humans' extinct evolutionary cousins, removed infected tissue from a tooth about 59,000 years ago. It is the oldest known example of dental treatment.

Over the past two decades, paleoanthropologists have found many stone tools, bones and teeth in the Siberian Neanderthal den, named Chagyrskaya Cave. One tooth, a molar, had a large hole in it -- evidence the cavity had been scraped and drilled with a stone tool to remove damage.

"It's basically a Neanderthal root canal," said John Olsen, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona and co-author of a study Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. "It would have provided relief from what was presumably pretty excruciating."

The procedure, Olsen and his colleagues said, would have ameliorated, if not eliminated, the source of the Neanderthal's pain by exposing and digging into the offending pulp. That is the innermost layer of the tooth, containing nerves, connective tissue and blood vessels. The procedure appears to have been successful: The Neanderthal patient kept chewing with it afterward, judging by wear patterns on the tooth.

The finding pushes back the earliest example of complex dental intervention by about 45,000 years. Previous studies documented dentistry on a Homo sapiens tooth in Italy that had signs of scraping and toothpicking about 14,000 years ago. But that kind of intervention is mild compared with what the researchers saw on the Neanderthal tooth, Olsen said.

Most likely, he said, the Neanderthal who conducted the procedure used a small stone tool with a narrow tip made of jasper, a hard crystalline mineral. Similar jasper tools have been found nearby in the cave. The operator would have held the tool between the thumb and forefinger and rotated back and forth while pressing down, Olsen said.

"It required a lot of fine motor control," he added.

To confirm that the hole in the tooth resulted from an intentional procedure, the researchers experimented with three modern human teeth. They found that drilling using a similar stone tool created a similar hole.

The finding shows Neanderthals could diagnose a source of pain, select an appropriate tool and persist with a procedure despite a patient's discomfort, said study co-author Ksenia Kolobova, of the Russian Academy of Sciences. A helper likely held the patient's head still, she said, suggesting the procedure happened within a close social bond, possibly between family members.

"This discovery is another piece in the puzzle that is leading us to a much more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of Neanderthals," Olsen said. "The revelation, quite frankly, is that Neanderthals, both behaviorally and socially, were quite similar to modern human beings."

Write to Aylin Woodward at aylin.woodward@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 13, 2026 14:00 ET (18:00 GMT)

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