Recent archaeological studies have found that Native American people added jewels and decoration to their teeth nearly 2,500 years ago!
In southern North America, tribes people went to ancient “cosmetic dentists” to beautify their teeth with semiprecious gems, notches and grooves. This remarkable discovery was made when scientists were studying thousands of teeth in the collections of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. Scientists are unsure of the exact origin of most teeth in the collections, but they belonged to people living in the region called Mesoamerica before the Spanish conquests of the 1500s.