Science

Stone Age surgery: Ancient amputation marks oldest known operation

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Archeologists Andika Priyatno and Tim Maloney excavate the remains
Tim Maloney
Archeologists Andika Priyatno and Tim Maloney excavate the remains
Tim Maloney
The 31,000-year-old remains are missing their lower left leg, with signs of healing around the wound that indicate it was a deliberate – and successful – amputation
Tim Maloney

Archeologists have discovered the oldest evidence of a surgical procedure in humans. A Stone Age hunter-gatherer, who lived more than 30,000 years ago, was found to have a carefully amputated leg, making it the earliest known surgery by tens of thousands of years.

The discovery was made in 2020 during an archeological excavation at Liang Tebo, a limestone cave on the island of Borneo. There, scientists found a human skeleton that was missing its left foot and the lower part of its leg.

But this wasn’t just a serious injury or bones that had gone missing port-mortem – on closer inspection by paleopathologists, growth patterns were found around the wound that indicated it had healed. This, the team says, suggests that the limb was deliberately amputated between six and nine years before the individual’s death.

“In fact, it was a huge surprise that this ancient forager survived a very serious and life-threatening childhood operation, that the wound healed to form a stump, and that they then lived for years in mountainous terrain with altered mobility – suggesting a high degree of community care,” said Dr Melandri Vlok, an author of the study.

The 31,000-year-old remains are missing their lower left leg, with signs of healing around the wound that indicate it was a deliberate – and successful – amputation
Tim Maloney

Using a dating technique called electron spin resonance on the teeth, as well as radiocarbon dating on the sediment the remains were buried in, the team calculated that the individual had died about 31,000 years ago. That makes it the oldest known evidence of surgery in human history, by quite a margin.

It was previously thought that the first operation humans performed was trepanation, where a hole was drilled into the skull in the belief it would relieve a range of neurological problems. But the oldest evidence of this practice dates back “only” about 14,000 years, less than half the age of the amputation.

The team says that this complicated surgery – and its apparent success – indicates a far more sophisticated understanding of anatomy and infection prevention than we give Stone Age people credit for.

“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,” said Professor Maxime Aubert, co-lead author of the study.

The team says that it’s unclear as of yet whether the people who lived in this region, which is now Indonesia, were way ahead of their time, or if it’s the first known example of a widespread, advanced medical knowledge. Future finds could help shed light on that question.

The research was published in the journal Nature.

Source: Griffith University via Scimex

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3 comments
TechGazer
"Suggests" surgical amputation. That doesn't rule out accidental amputation (animal attack, falling rock, human attack). I think it does show community support, since that sort of injury and limitation would be hard to survive otherwise.

Unless the wound shows signs of actual surgery (appropriate stone tool marks), my guess is that they're making the 'earliest surgery' claim just to boost their careers, which may backfire if they can't provide that evidence.
Ric
Do contemporary hunter gatherer societies practice surgery of this kind???
pmshah
Why am I not surprised? We have recorded surgical procedures in our Vedas which are known to be at lest 8-10 thousand years old. The surgeon who wrote this was Sushruta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushruta