The 25,000-Year-Old Teeth That Just Rewrote The History Of Human Drug Use

The two sites were occupied by different communities, in different periods, connected by the same broad regional tradition of karst-adapted foraging.

The fact that the same distinctive dental pathology — the specific rounded grooves from nut-sucking — appears at both sites, separated by 33 kilometers and more than 10,000 years of time, is one of the key arguments for the study’s central claim of cultural persistence.

If the behavior were a random individual habit, we would not expect it to show up in two different individuals at two different sites in two different periods.

The recurrence is the signature of a cultural practice — something learned, transmitted, maintained across generations, and practiced broadly enough in the regional population to show up in multiple individuals at multiple sites.