Did These Ice Age Europeans Wear Cheek Piercings?
Wear patterns on the teeth of skeletons found in Central Europe suggest children as young as 6 may have been wearing labrets between 25,000 and 29,000 years ago
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Researchers have long wondered about the mysterious flat patches they found on the teeth of Ice Age Europeans. These dental wear patterns didn’t seem to come from typical behaviors, like chewing or grinding.
Now, after investigating the teeth more closely, one archaeologist has come up with a possible explanation: cheek piercings.
John Willman, a biological anthropologist at Portugal’s University of Coimbra, outlines his theory in a new paper published in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.
Willman examined dozens of skeletons from the Pavlovian culture, a group of early humans that lived in Central Europe between 25,000 and 29,000 years ago. The study focused on the skeletons’ canine teeth and cheek teeth, which showed unexpected patterns of wear in their enamel.
He posits that children as young as 6 may have worn cheek piercings, also known as labrets. He found the unique, flat wear patterns on some baby teeth, which suggests Pavlovian people got their first labret at some point during childhood.
Adults had more enamel wear on their cheek teeth than children did, and some adults showed evidence of having worn labrets on both sides of their face. Pavlovian individuals might have worn progressively larger labrets as they got older, Willman suggests. Or maybe they wore labrets to mark new life stages.
“Having labrets seems to be related to belonging to the group,” Willman tells Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove. The varying levels of tooth wear “may relate to individual choice, different life experiences that ‘earn’ labrets during life, like going through puberty or marriage.”
Willman also found evidence that some of the individuals’ teeth had shifted in their mouths, which further supports his labret theory. Teeth rotation and crowding may have resulted from constantly wearing cheek piercings—“basically the opposite of what happens if you wear braces or [a] retainer to straighten your own teeth,” he writes in a blog post about his research.
Archaeologists have not discovered any artifacts that resemble labrets among Pavlovian remains. But that’s not necessarily unusual: Many items used in the day-to-day lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors were not preserved, reports Live Science.
The labrets may have been made of materials like leather or wood, which disintegrated over time. Another possibility is that the labrets were reused—“kept in circulation,” as Willman writes on his blog—rather than buried with their original wearer.
“It’s my hope that future analyses of the material culture from Pavlovian archaeological sites find some artifacts that resemble labrets documented in other parts of the world,” he adds.
In the meantime, the possibility that Ice Age Europeans may have worn labrets “offers a window onto a long disappeared behavior,” says April Nowell, an archaeologist at the University of Canada who was not involved with the research, to Live Science.
“It gives scientists a way of studying personal and social identity as they change throughout a person's life,” she adds.
This isn’t the first time Willman has found evidence of piercings. His research also suggests that a young adult male who lived between 12,000 and 20,000 years ago in present-day Tanzania likely had three facial piercings: one in his lower lip and one in each cheek.
“We’re potentially opening a window into the life of this individual,” Willman told New Scientist’s Michael Marshall in 2020.
More broadly, archaeologists have found evidence of other types of body modification dating back hundreds or thousands of years. Our ancestors sported tattoos, changed the shape of their skulls, removed healthy teeth, wore nose rings and intentionally created scars on their skin.
