The Mayans didn't just beat us to the precession of the equinoxes, or
super-precise calendars, super-precise astronomy and architecture. They
beat us to dental implant technology too. Found on a dental implant
technology website quite by accident was this surprise:
"History of Dental Implant"
"The Mayan civilization has been shown to have used the earliest known
examples of endosseous implants (implants embedded into bone), dating
back over 1,350 years before Per Branemark started working with
titanium. While excavating Mayan burial sites in Honduras in 1931,
archaeologists found a fragment of mandible of Mayan origin, dating from
about 600 AD. This mandible, which is considered to be that of a woman
in her twenties, had three tooth-shaped pieces of shell placed into the
sockets of three missing lower incisor teeth. For forty years the
archaeological world considered that these shells were placed under the
nose in a manner also observed in the ancient Egyptians. However, in
1970 a Brazilian dental academic, Professor Amadeo Bobbio studied the
mandibular specimen and took a series of radiographs. He noted compact
bone formation around two of the implants which led him to conclude that
the implants were placed during life."