Dental Mutilation in Early Times

Abstract

Our page 284 of this issue we publish a summary of Sir Arthur Keith's report to the first International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences on the human skeletal remains discovered by Miss Garrod in Palestinian caves in association with a mesolithic culture. The report directs attention to certain cultural practices for which the skeletal material affords evidence, such as the evulsion of the. upper incisors and the practice of cannibalism. In the discussion which followed the presentation of the report, Prof. Elliot Smith expressed doubt as to chronology, and questioned the high antiquity of the practices to which Sir Arthur had referred the conditions observed in the skeletal material. In a letter on the Oldoway skeleton, which appears in the August issue of Man, Prof. Elliot Smith, writing before the positive evidence pointing to the recent origin of that specimen was available, argues that the cultural evidence, upon which reliance had been placed in support of the antiquity of the remains, in effect tells against it. In particular, he maintains that the deformation of the teeth exhibited by Oldoway man, a filing away of the anterior surface of the lower incisors, first appears, with other forms of dental deformation, in human remains from a Ptolemaic-Roman cemetery near Dacca, in Lower Nubia, recorded by Dr. D. E. Derry and himself. He suggests, further, that the process of filing was the original device for removing the teeth, and was almost immediately superseded by lateral filing, or the more drastic evulsion. Therefore, he thinks, the practice of dental mutilation was not introduced before about 300 B.C. In this connexion we may direct attention to the recently published account of the fossil man of Asselar (Sahara) by MM. Boule and Vallois (see p. 280), in which the authors interpret the condition of the upper jaw as due to the evulsion of the upper incisors in early life, and refer to a similar condition in the fossil human remains of Afalou-bou-Rhummel (Algeria). The apparent age of the Asselar man at the time of the operation conforms to its generally accepted relation to puberty ceremonial while the geological and palæntological evidence, if correctly recorded and interpreted, points unquestionably to a Pleistocene dating.