400,000-year-old dental tartar provides earliest evidence of human-made pollution
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- Published: Thursday, 20 August 2015 07:45
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Researchers have uncovered evidence of food and potential respiratory irritants entrapped in the dental tartar of 400,000-year-old teeth at Qesem Cave near Tel Aviv, the site of many major discoveries from the late Lower Paleolithic period. The research provides direct evidence of what early Palaeolithic people ate and the quality of the air they breathed inside Qesem Cave.
The research, published in Quaternary International, provides direct evidence of what early Palaeolithic people ate and the quality of the air they breathed inside Qesem Cave. Possible respiratory irritants, including traces of charcoal -- humanmade environmental pollution -- found in the dental calculus, may have resulted from smoke inhalation from indoor fires used for roasting meat on a daily basis. This earliest direct evidence for inhaled environmental pollution may well have had a deleterious effect on the health of these early humans.
"Human teeth of this age have never been studied before for dental calculus, and we had very low expectations because of the age of the plaque," said Prof. Gopher. "However, our international collaborators, using a combination of methods, found many materials entrapped within the calculus. Because the cave was sealed for 200,000 years, everything, including the teeth and its calculus, were preserved exceedingly well."
In what Prof. Barkai describes as a "time capsule," the analysed calculus revealed three major findings: charcoal from indoor fires; evidence for the ingestion of essential plant-based dietary components; and fibers that might have been used to clean teeth or were remnants of raw materials.
"This is the first evidence that the world's first indoor BBQs had health-related consequences," said Prof. Barkai. "The people who lived in Qesem not only enjoyed the benefits of fire -- roasting their meat indoors -- but they also had to find a way of controlling the fire -- of living with it. This is one of the first, if not the first, cases of manmade pollution on the planet. I live near power plants, near chemical factories. On the one hand, we are dependent on technology, but on the other, we are inhaling its pollutants. Progress has a price -- and we find possibly the first evidence of this at Qesem Cave 400,000 years ago."
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