Tokyo and New York. A skeleton discovered in a remote part of Borneo rewrites the history of ancient medicine and reveals that the first successful amputation was performed 31,000 years ago, according to a study.
Until now, the oldest evidence of such an intervention, discovered in 2010 at a Neolithic site in France, dated back 7,000 years. It was an amputation of a man’s arm, no doubt successful, according to analysis of the bones, which showed signs of scarring.
Scientists agree that the first medical practices are linked to the Neolithic revolution some 10,000 years ago, when agriculture and sedentarization raised previously unknown health issues.
But the search for ancient human remains at least 31,000 years old, in the Indonesian part of Borneo, modifies this view by showing that hunter-gatherers already practiced surgery.
The discovery “rewrites our understanding of medical knowledge,” explained paleontologist Tim Maloney of Griffith University in Australia, who led the study.
The bones were found in 2020 in the limestone grotto of Liang Tebo, known for its cave paintings. Scientists say that the amputation was performed when the person was a child, and that the “patient” lived for years as an amputee. Prehistoric surgery could show that humans were making medical advances much earlier than previously thought, according to the study published yesterday in Nature.
Among the countless bats, terns, swifts and even some scorpions that inhabited the place, paleontologists delicately removed the sedimentary layers and found the burial of a remarkably preserved skeleton.
As the body was missing, however, the left ankle and foot, the tip of the remaining leg bone indicated a “sharp and oblique cut, which can be seen by looking through the bone,” Maloney described in a press conference. .
That appearance would have been less regular if the amputation had been caused by a fall or an animal attack. Therefore, everything indicates that it was not an accidental amputation, but a true medical option.
Even more surprising: the patient, who died at an estimated age of 20, appears to have survived between six and nine years after the operation, based on signs of bone repair, observable under a microscope.
Furthermore, it is unlikely that the amputation was carried out as a punishment, since the child –or the young adolescent– seems to have received a thorough treatment after the surgery. “This supposes a deep knowledge of the human anatomy, of the muscular and vascular system”, according to the analysis.
The people who operated on the young man had to “regularly clean, disinfect and dress the wound” to prevent postoperative bleeding or infection, which could cause death.
The physical state of the young amputee, handicapped and dependent, probably forced those around him to take care of him for six to nine years, which reveals an altruistic behavior in this group of hunter-gatherers.
These works “provide a new vision of the care and treatment that was lavished in a very distant past and modify our view that these issues were not taken into consideration in prehistory,” said Charlotte Ann Roberts, an archaeologist at the British University of Durham , in a comment accompanying the study.
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