Mehrgarh
The earliest farming village in South Asia, and the site of the oldest known dentistry.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 4.4 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Mehrgarh in Balochistan, occupied from around 7000 BCE, documents the local beginnings of wheat and barley farming and cattle, sheep and goat herding, and is the direct ancestor of the Indus Valley tradition. Among its burials are nine adults with teeth showing neat conical holes drilled with flint bow-drills — the oldest evidence of dentistry anywhere, and several of them show wear afterwards, so the patients lived.