Groovy Choppers.

This article reports that a Swedish anthropologist has found the first evidence of dental modification by early Europeans. The anthropologist has found that young men in Viking-age Scandinavia filed deep furrows into their upper front teeth. Caroline Arcini of the National Heritage Board in Lund, discovered the marks on the 1000-year-old skeletons of 24 young males, which were among several hundred skeletons unearthed from four different cemeteries in southern Sweden and held in storage in several museum collections. Arcini thinks earlier researchers assumed the dental marks to be from wear or damage. But the furrows were clearly filed intentionally and with a great deal of skill. She presented her reports in a paper in press at the "American Journal of Physical Anthropology." She speculates that the men filled the grooves with a colored substance such as wax or fat mixed with pigment to make the marks more visible. George Milner, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, who has studied similar dental modifications in prehistoric North Americans, says such marks usually indicate a social group affiliation.