Horses Have Had Dental Appointments in Mongolia for Over 3,000 Years

[Judi Lynn]

By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | July 2, 2018 05:11pm ET

- click for image -

https://img.purch.com/h/1400/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5saXZlc2NpZW5jZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzEwMC81MzIvb3JpZ2luYWwvaG9yc2VzLU1vbmdvbGlhLkpQRw==

Horses hang out near a deer stone site in Bayankhongor, in central Mongolia's Khangai Mountains.
Credit: William Taylor

Imagine extracting a wayward tooth from a young horse more than two millennia before the discovery of laughing gas. It may sound like a Herculean task, but the ancient people of Mongolia figured it out, making them the oldest veterinary dentists on record.

Researchers made the discovery by examining 85 ancient horse remains, dating from about 1200 B.C. to 700 B.C., that had been buried in equine graves by the nomadic Deer Stone-Khirigsuur culture in Mongolia. The researchers found that one of these teeth was sticking out at an odd angle and had been cut, possibly with a stone, in about 1150 B.C., making it the oldest known evidence of horse dentistry in the world.

Later, in teeth dated to 750 B.C. and afterward, the researchers found evidence that people from the Deer Stone-Khirigsuur culture were pulling the so-called wolf tooth, a vestigial (functionless) premolar that erupts during a horse's first year of life. The wolf tooth typically falls out before the horse's third birthday, but if it doesn't, its presence can be painful for horses wearing a metal bit, the researchers said. [Beasts of Burden: Amazing Horse Photos]

Perhaps the introduction of metal bits explains why the people of the Deer Stone-Khirigsuur culture (about 1300 B.C. to 700 B.C.) began pulling out horses' wolf teeth, although the finding is correlational, so it's hard to say so for sure, said study lead researcher William Taylor, a postdoctoral research fellow of archaeology at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in Germany.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/62974-oldest-horse-dentistry-on-record.html