Every teenager and 20-something thinks a facial piercing or three is a new form of rebellion. In fact, prehistoric kids wore those very same piercings, according to a new study published in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.
The discovery came via John Willman, a biological anthropologist at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, who was studying a peculiar kind of wear on the teeth of Ice Age Europeans. The marks—strangely flat patches on the cheek-facing sides of canines and molars—didn’t match the usual wear from chewing or grinding. The answer? Prehistoric piercings.
Willman’s study argues that some of the earliest fashion statements came in the form of labrets—cheek piercings that, over time, quite literally left their mark. These weren’t just decorative baubles. Willman suggests they signaled group membership, with children as young as 10 sporting the look and adults wearing larger versions as they aged.
“Getting your first labret seemed to have occurred in childhood, since wear is documented in some baby teeth,” Willman told LiveScience. Adults, meanwhile, had more extensive enamel loss across multiple teeth, suggesting that their piercings grew with them—possibly marking rites of passage like puberty or marriage.
The labrets themselves, likely made of perishable materials like wood or leather, have long since vanished, leaving only their unintended signature on skeletal remains. But the effect was more than cosmetic. “Piercings can cause a tooth to move—almost like ‘reverse’ braces,” Willman said. Some individuals even displayed signs of dental crowding, the result of a lifetime of metal (or bone, or whatever Ice Age people used) pressing against their teeth.
The findings have drawn enthusiasm from other archaeologists. “As someone who studies Ice Age adolescents, I find this study very exciting,” April Nowell, of the University of Victoria, said. She argued that most day-to-day objects from hunter-gatherer societies have long since decayed, making it easy to underestimate the sophistication of their cultures.
Willman’s research, she said, “offers a window onto a long disappeared behavior” and a rare glimpse into how ancient humans expressed identity, status, and belonging. Next up? A closer look at artifacts from Pavlovian and Ice Age burial sites to see if archaeologists have long overlooked the Ice Age equivalent of lost earrings.
