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Drilled teeth of Mehrgarh

Eleven molars from graves at Mehrgarh carry neat holes drilled in living people, the oldest known evidence of dentistry anywhere in the world.

Photo: Ashish_Premier · CC BY-SA 3.0
Field
Medicine
Date
c. 7500–5500 BCE
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Cite

MLA

“Drilled teeth of Mehrgarh.” Hindu History, 2026, https://www.hinduhistory.in/vijnana/mehrgarh-dentistry-drilling/. Accessed .

APA

Hindu History. (2026). Drilled teeth of Mehrgarh. Retrieved , from https://www.hinduhistory.in/vijnana/mehrgarh-dentistry-drilling/

01What was found

Mehrgarh, at the foot of the Bolan Pass in Balochistan, is one of the oldest farming villages of South Asia, excavated by Jean-François Jarrige’s French team from 1974. In 2006 Andrea Coppa and colleagues reported in Nature that eleven molar crowns from nine adults in the Neolithic graveyard had been drilled. The holes are conical or cylindrical, up to 3.5 mm deep, and the worn edges show the people went on chewing for some time after.

02How it was done

The same village had a busy bead workshop, where craftsmen drilled stone beads with flint drill-heads on a bow drill. The researchers made a bow drill of the same kind and found it could bore a human tooth in under a minute. No filling survives in the holes, and some may have been packed with something that has decayed. Several drilled teeth show decay, which suggests the drilling was meant to treat pain, not to decorate.

03Limits of the find

The practice seems to have lasted about 1,500 years and then stopped; later graves at Mehrgarh show no drilled teeth. So this is not the start of an unbroken Indian dental tradition, and it should not be linked straight to Ayurveda. What it proves is that the people of the Bolan valley, ancestors in part of the Sindhu-Sarasvati cities, were treating living patients with skill thousands of years before writing.

More in this family

The Charaka SamhitaAgnivesha’s tantra, redacted by Charaka, completed by DridhabalaSushruta’s surgerySushruta Samhita; oldest dated manuscript 878 CEYoga as a discipline: Patanjali’s sutrasYoga Sutra of Maharshi Patanjali; Vyasa’s bhashyaMedicine for elephants and horsesAshoka’s edict c. 257 BCE; Hastyayurveda and Shalihotra texts

Evidence 1

The drilled teeth of MehrgarhExcavation
c. 7000–5500 BCE; published 2006

The drilled teeth of Mehrgarh

Eleven molar crowns from nine adults with neat holes drilled into them, the earliest evidence of dentistry on living people anywhere.

Places 1

MehrgarhExcavated
The Sindhu–Sarasvati Civilisation

Mehrgarh

A farming village at the foot of the Bolan pass, lived in from c. 7000 BCE: among the oldest in South Asia, with barley and wheat, cattle and goats, mud-brick houses and the earliest known drilled teeth. It is the deep root of the Sindhu–Sarasvati cities.