Federico Bernardini and Claudio Tunitz, team leaders at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Italy, along with researchers from the Sincrotrone Trieste laboratory and other centers in Italy and Australia, studied a 6,500-year-old human lower jaw.
The results of the research were published in the online open access journal PLoS ONE.
The tooth is part of a human jawbone found in Slovenia near the city of Trieste. The researchers hope that this find will help build an understanding of ancient dentistry, as current knowledge in this area is scarce.
The find is a left incisor, the crown of which was filled with beeswax.
The scientists used a wide variety of tools, including synchrotron computed microtomography (micro-CT), radiocarbon dating with accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), infrared (IR) spectroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM).
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