 Ancient Man Could Have Used Grass to Clean Teeth
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Nov. 6, 2003 — Cleaning your teeth may be the oldest human habit, according to a paleontologist whose experiments suggest early Man used grass stalks as toothpicks.
Fossil hunters have long puzzled over tiny grooves, between 0.06 to 0.1 inches wide, that have been found on ancient human teeth, in some cases on specimens dating back 1.8 million years.
The answer may have been found by paleontologist Leslea Hlusko of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the British weekly New Scientist reports in next Saturday's issue.
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Hlusko spent eight hours grinding a piece of grass along a tooth taken from a baboon, and replicated the experiment for three hours on a modern human tooth.
In both cases, the grooves astonishingly replicated the marks found on early hominid teeth fund by electron microscopes.
Grass has this abrasive effect because it contains large numbers of tough silica particles, Hlusko believes.
Her study is published in full in a specialist journal, Current Anthropology.
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