This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagata.

We have pretty good dental hygiene today.

Regular brushing, flossing, dental visits,

but thousands of years ago, not so much, which means the old-timer's

teeth had a lot of plaque, and today that ancient tartar is a gold mine for archaeologists.

What that's doing is it's basically entombing

all this kind of bimolecular information

that comes from your mouth.

Jessica Hendy, an archaeological scientist

with the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

Hendy and her team used dental scrapers, just like your dentist uses, to remove tartar from

human teeth found in Great Britain, dating from the 8th century BC, the Iron Age, all the way to the 1800s, with some modern samples

thrown in as a metric. They extracted proteins from the dental scrapings and then used mass

spectrometry to reconstruct the menu.

Across the ages were the remains of dairy products.

As well as milk, we found evidence of cereal, specifically oats,

and we find evidence of peas and also evidence of

something in the cabbage family. The full bill affair is in the proceedings of the

Royal Society B. The study shows that probing proteins in tartar can help figure

out ancient diets, especially for foods that

themselves don't preserve well.

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