A 6,500-year-old tooth packed with beeswax represents the earliest dental filling, newly published research says.
Found in part of a human jaw excavated in a Slovenian cave, the tooth is a left canine, thought to have belonged to a man aged between 24 and 30 years old. Research led by Federico Bernardini and Claudio Tuniz of the Abdus Salam Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy examined a vertical crack in the tooth, which had been filled with a resinous substance.
