Tooth Truth

It is no wonder that my hands shook when I first picked Pech de l’Azé, the little Neanderthal child’s skull, out of the drawer. My son John kept cautioning me, “Dad, be careful!” I was trying as hard as I could. We had large piles of sponges that we gently placed under each skull when we set it in the head-holder, so as to support it from underneath….I picked up the Pech de l’Azé skull in my hands and carefully placed the lower teeth against the upper teeth in what we orthodontists call centric occlusion (normal, central position of upper and lower teeth with maximum contact of all the cusps). I did this over and over three, four, five times, and each time the jaw condyles (ends) fit perfectly together in the sockets when the teeth were in this maximum centric occlusion position. It didn’t look like the drawing at all!! Well, I thought, maybe there is a good reason for this. I checked what Patte had to say in his description of the text of the article….He said, “When the teeth are placed in occlusion or contact, the condyle does not fit properly with the socket in the cranium of the skull.” But it really did fit with the teeth in the normal occlusion, normal contact position.

With great trepidation, I first checked the real photos of Pech in the illustrations in the back of the Neanderthal Centenary book. They matched exactly, only it didn’t show the lower and the upper jaw together with the teeth in contact….The name Pech de l’Azé was written on the right side of the skull that I held in my hands….However this was a new non-ape-like position of the lower jaw. For a moment my mind was unable to entirely comprehend what I was really observing….If I took my radiographs in this new and correct position, because the teeth fit together perfectly, this would be a shock for everyone in the department of human paleontology, in France, and eventually in the world.

Excerpted from Buried Alive by Jack Cuozzo as he describes how his discoveries of the lies and cover-ups surrounding the fossilized remains of so-called Neanderthals put him and his family in grave danger.