Mongolian Herders Removed ‘Wolf’ Teeth From Young Horses 3000 Years Ago, Oldest Evidence of Horse Dental Care

Animals are prone to encountering health problems just like humans and there are veterinarians to treat them. But what about those animals in ancient times who faced health crises or dental issues? It turns out the ancient Mongolian herders practiced experimental dentistry more than 3,000 years ago, according to an archaeological story published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Mongolians essentially used some innovative methods to take care of their horses when the earliest ideas of riding horses emerged.

Archaeologist and grantee, William Taylor, from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, was part of an excavation that helped discover horse burials on the Mongolian steppe. After analyzing the skulls of the animal's remains, archaeologists determined that people in that region used to saw off the unruly teeth of their horses with stone tools. They even pulled away the horses' teeth that got in the way of putting in metal mouthpieces.

Taylor suggested that dental care for horses was possibly discovered by the nomadic people who used to travel large distances to find better landscapes and eventually started riding horses in wars. The people living on the Mongolian steppe used horses for famous conquests such as that of Genghis Khan in the Middle Ages. Through the study, scientists estimated that the domestication of horses started in Eurasia more than 5,000 years ago.

In 2015, Taylor and his team started working at the Deer Stone-Khirigsuur Complex where the earliest physical evidence for home domestication was found. "We wanted to understand what we could learn about horse transport through the teeth," Taylor revealed, according to National Geographic. The study shared two examples of young Bronze Age horses whose incisors appeared to have been sawed off partially. The earliest examples of such dental experiments on horses were discovered at the site of Uguumur which dates back to 1150 B.C.

"This animal would have had a ton of trouble with eating correctly and with its behavior," Taylor explained. "It looks like people used a tool to restore the normally flat surface of the mouth by sawing the wayward incisor off." Some other skeletal remains of horses retrieved from the site of Bor Shoroonii Am indicated that Mongolian herders used to extract the vestigial front teeth (Wolf teeth) from the young horses to relieve them from pain. "The innovation of metal bits may have been one of the things that allowed horseback riding to transition from a herding tactic to a military technology," Taylor mentioned, adding that metal bits helped the riders to control their horses.

"Importantly, this work also identifies these dynamic innovations as emerging from pastoral nomadic communities, groups that have often been marginalized in both contemporary and past narratives," Robin Bendrey, an archaeologist from the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the study, said. "It makes a major contribution to our understanding of the origins of equine dentistry." Using horses in ancient times for transportation was an ideal way to speed up communication between people living far away. "As a person who deals with bones, it appeals to me that something so prosaic as pulled teeth could speak to a profound change in the course of history," Melinda Zeder, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the research, concluded."