Neanderthals had the know-how to identify a tooth infection and the motor skills to drill out the damage, according to a study published May 13, 2026, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Alisa Zubova of Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences (Kunstkamera), St. Petersburg, and colleagues.
We didn’t have any kind of local anesthesia until they figured out cocaine could do this near the end of the 1800s.
Medicinal plants to manage pain have been used since the dawn of time. Western medecine took a while to care about how patients feel though.
Cloves were about as close as you could get before that.