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After Sanjiv was anesthetized, Sievers removed pulp from the pulp cavity inside the tooth, disinfected the area and then filled it with a rubberlike material called gutta-percha to make a watertight seal.

“I’m just accessing the pulp cavity,” Hall said nonchalantly, shortly after he started jamming one file after the other into the enamel of Nikita’s tooth.

To get the “when,” the scientists collected ivory from the pulp cavity, or roots, of 231 tusks—the same tusks that Wasser and his colleagues had analyzed to show the “where.”

Dental caries is a process of disintegration which begins in the enamel of a tooth—usually in the region of its neck—and gradually extends through the dentine till the pulp cavity is reached.

E, enamel; D, dentine; P, pulp cavity; C, cement; B, blood vessels; N, nerve.