An Ornament That Sat on a Museum Shelf for Nearly 20 Years Turned Out to Be a Human Canine Tooth (Jablanica Site, Serbia)

Explanation

An artifact excavated from Jablanica, a Neolithic settlement site south of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, and shelved for nearly 20 years in a museum, classified as something else, has now been re-examined and identified as an ornament made from a perforated human canine tooth. The report was made by Nemanja Marković and Ana Maričić of the Institute of Archaeology in Belgrade, and the paper was published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.

The tooth is less than 23mm long. A hole, carefully made by human hands, is present on one side, and it is thought to have been worn on a cord. The research team estimated the tooth to date to around 4700 BCE, roughly 6,500 years ago. The dating was not performed directly on the tooth itself, but determined by comparison with a shell bracelet of known date found at the same site.

The tooth also reveals information about its owner. Based on the wear pattern on the chewing surface, the owner of this tooth is thought to have been a middle-aged adult. Furthermore, because the surface of the tooth root is smooth, it is believed to have been removed after death rather than extracted from a living person, since there are no marks of the kind left by tooth extraction.

Why does this merit a report? The custom of wearing perforated animal teeth is widely found throughout European prehistory. Ornaments made from deer or boar teeth are not uncommon. But human teeth are a different matter. This report is said to be the only reliably documented human tooth ornament from the Neolithic period in the Central Balkans.

And this artifact is not something newly excavated. It had already been excavated, placed in a museum storeroom, and catalogued as something else. For nearly 20 years, it sat in a place accessible to anyone's eyes, yet what it actually was remained unknown. Not only excavation sites but also museum storage shelves can be subjects of investigation—this report demonstrates that in concrete form.

Paper: "Modified Human Tooth Pendant From the Late Neolithic (5300/5200–4600/4500 cal BC) Site of Jablanica, Serbia," International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, DOI: 10.1002/oa.70151
Source: Phys.org (August 22, 2026) https://phys.org/news/2026-08-museum-shelf-mystery-reveals-year.html