Sensitive Teeth: a Stone Age Beeswax Filling Explains the Zing; and Why Today’s Pastes Either Seal the Tooth or Calm the Nerve
A spoon of ice cream, a sip of cold water, a breath of winter air, and one tooth answers with a short, bright zing that is gone before you can point at it. You wait. It fades, until the next sip. Most people learn to chew on the other side and say nothing. If that is you, you are in large company, and in very old company. Sensitive teeth are not a modern complaint. Six and a half thousand years ago a young man in what is now Slovenia had exactly this problem, and somebody tried to fix it with beeswax. What they did is, in principle, what your toothpaste should be doing tonight.
Sensitive teeth in the Stone Age: the jaw that waited a century
In May 1911 the Trieste naturalist Josef Müller pulled a human jaw out of the rock of a cave near the village of Lonche, in northern Istria. It went to the Natural History Museum of Trieste and lay there, barely studied, for a hundred years. In 2012 a team led by Federico Bernardini scanned it with synchrotron micro CT, mostly to test the method. On the left lower canine they found what nobody had seen: a cap of beeswax. Radiocarbon dated the jaw to 6,655 to 6,400 years before present and the wax to 6,645 to 6,440, the same lifetime. The man was 24 to 30 years old.
The tooth explains the wax. Its tip was worn flat, so the yellow dentine under the enamel lay open. A vertical crack ran from the chewing surface down to the top of the pulp chamber. The wax filled the worn hollow and went 1.43 mm into the crack. The authors are careful: it may have been placed shortly after death. But if it was placed in life, its purpose was plain, to stop a worn, cracked tooth from hurting every time it was used. That would make it the earliest direct evidence of a filling meant to relieve pain.
What causes sensitive teeth: an open door, not a sick nerve
Whoever pressed that wax could not know why it worked. We can. Enamel feels nothing. The dentine beneath it is threaded with microscopic tubules full of fluid that run toward the pulp. While enamel or gum covers them, their ends are closed. When enamel wears away or the gum line recedes, the ends open to the mouth. Cold, air, sugar or a fingernail moves the fluid, and the moving fluid tugs at nerve endings at the inner end. This is the hydrodynamic theory, worked out by the Swedish researcher Martin Brännström in the 1960s, and it is why the pain is so sharp and so short: it lasts exactly as long as the fluid moves.
It is also far more common than the silence around it suggests. In 2011 researchers examined 3,187 adults aged 18 to 35 at ordinary dental practices in seven European countries and blew cold air on their teeth. 41.9 % felt pain, yet only 26.8 % had reported sensitivity in the questionnaire. The strongest links were erosive tooth wear and receding gums, and the habits behind them: heartburn and reflux, energy drinks, acidic food, smoking.
Tooth sensitivity to cold: the two ways we stop it today
Every treatment since Lonche does one of two things: it closes the door, or it quiets the bell. Closing means plugging the open tubules. Stannous fluoride, arginine with calcium carbonate, calcium sodium phosphosilicate and hydroxyapatite all leave deposits in or over them, the wax, rebuilt at the scale of a micrometre. Quieting means potassium, which damps the nerve’s response. The evidence is unusually large. A 2020 network meta analysis pooled 125 randomised trials with 12,541 patients: most desensitising formulations beat plain fluoride paste or placebo, and calcium sodium phosphosilicate helped against touch, cold and air alike. A 2023 analysis of 32 trials and 4,638 people concluded that pastes with stannous, potassium with or without stannous, or arginine, used twice a day, can be recommended.
What this means at your sink. Use a desensitising paste twice a day, every day: the trials judge these pastes over weeks, not after one brushing. Brush with a soft brush and light pressure, because hard scrubbing is one of the ways the gum line and enamel wear open in the first place. Give enamel time after anything acidic before you brush. And notice which pain you have. A zing that fades within seconds once the cold is gone is the open door kind. Pain on biting, pain that lingers, or one tooth that throbs on its own is a different story, a crack, a cavity, a nerve in trouble, and it needs a dentist, not a new tube. The Lonche canine was cracked down to the pulp chamber: that is a dentist’s tooth, then as now.
A soft brush is the cheapest part of the fix. Ours is SENSITIV: ultra soft DuPont Tynex® filaments with rounded ends, made for teeth that already complain. It seals nothing, that is the paste’s job. It simply stops adding to the wear.
Tonight, when the cold water bites, do not switch sides. Turn your toothpaste over and look for the word that closes the door.
Six and a half thousand years ago someone understood that a sensitive tooth needs its door shut. We still do the same thing, we just do it twice a day.