Mayan Dental Implants

Iggy Dalrymple · � #1 � 04-19-2008, 09:28 AM

Quote:

The Mayan civilization has been shown to have used the earliest known examples of endosseous implants (implants embedded into bone), dating back over 1,350 years before Per Br�nemark started working with titanium. While excavating Mayan burial sites in Honduras in 1931, archaeologists found a fragment of mandible of Mayan origin, dating from about 600 AD. This mandible, which is considered to be that of a woman in her twenties, had three tooth-shaped pieces of shell placed into the sockets of three missing lower incisor teeth. For forty years the archaeological world considered that these shells were placed under the nose in a manner also observed in the ancient Egyptians. However, in 1970 a Brazilian dental academic, Professor Amadeo Bobbio studied the mandibular specimen and took a series of radiographs. He noted compact bone formation around two of the implants which led him to conclude that the implants were placed during life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_implant