Sept. 9, 2022 – A 31,000-year-old skeleton discovered in a cave in Borneo may be the earliest evidence of a surgical amputationIn humans.
The left side of the skeleton that was found in 2020 in Liang Tebo in Indonesian Borneo’s limestone cave, Liang Tebo was missing FootAccording to a study published by the journal, it also lost part of its left leg. Nature.
The leg bone had a clean cut, unlike a bone that had been crushed, leading researchers to conclude it was removed “through deliberate surgical amputation at the position of the distal tibia and fibula shafts,” Nature reported.
No signs of infection were found, ruling out an animal attack. The treatment also showed that the person had received community care. The procedure was done when the patient was a child. He or she lived for 6 to 9 additional years as an amputee.
Scientists have rethought the notion that medical science advanced after people switched to farming in the Ice Age. Borneo’s 31,000-year-old inhabitants were foragers.
According to Griffith University, Australia’s news release, the first evidence of an amputation was previously found in France in the 7,000 year-old skeleton from a Stone Age farmer, whose left forearm had been amputated above his elbow. (The university worked on the project with Indonesia’s Centre for Archaeology, Language and History.)
“What the new finding in Borneo demonstrates is that humans already had the ability to successfully amputate diseased or damaged limbs long before we began farming and living in permanent settlements,” Maxime Aubert, PhD, an archaeologist with Griffith University and co-leader of the project, said in the news release.
The finding suggests that “at least some modern human foraging groups in tropical Asia had developed sophisticated medical knowledge and skills long before the Neolithic farming transition,” Nature reported.
Researchers determined that the skeleton is 31,000 years old through a comparison TeethRadioisotope dating is used to date burial sediment. Some of the earliest known human rock art can be found in the region where the skeleton is located.
