6,500-Year-Old Human Tooth Pendant Found Misfiled on a Serbian Museum Shelf

More than 6,500 years ago, someone drilled a hole in a human tooth, strung it on a cord and likely wore it as a necklace. The ornament, found at the Vinca-culture site of Jablanica in Serbia, is described in a new study published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology as the only reliably documented human tooth ornament ever reported in the Neolithic central Balkans.

Jablanica, a Neolithic village just south of Belgrade, was part of the Vinca culture, one of Europe's largest prehistoric societies. Since the site's discovery in the late 1800s, it has produced pottery, figurines and carved bone tools.

The tooth, measuring just under an inch (23 millimetres), was found lying in a field, its crown split in two by years of agricultural activity. The fragments were taken to the Museum of Mladenovac, labelled as the remains of a bead and left on a shelf for nearly two decades, until archaeologist Nemanja Markovic of the Institute of Archaeology in Belgrade and colleague Ana Maricic took a closer look. 'My first reaction was curiosity rather than surprise,' Markovic said; once he recognised the shape of a human canine, 'it became clear that we were looking at something much more unusual than an ordinary tooth bead.'

Using visual inspection, microscopy and X-ray analysis, the researchers found that wear on the tooth's chewing surface suggested a middle-aged adult, while the smooth, undamaged root surface indicated the tooth was taken after its owner had died, not pulled out in life. To date the ornament, the team compared its drill marks with those on a shell bracelet found at Jablanica and dated to around 4700 B.C.; the similarities pointed to the same period, though Markovic cautioned that 'absolute certainty is not possible' for a surface find.

Ornaments of any kind are rare at Jablanica, where only two other pieces, a shell bracelet fragment and a shell pendant, have been found. 'Under the microscope, I could see the remarkable precision, evidence that this was not an improvised object but one that required considerable skill to produce and was worn for a prolonged period of time,' Markovic said. Similar human tooth pendants are rare across Europe, and none had previously been definitively proven in the Neolithic central Balkans.