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Skilled Surgery 31,000 Years Ago
A skeleton discovered in a cave in Indonesia has turned out to be evidence of the earliest known surgical amputation, pre-dating other discoveries of complex medical procedures across Eurasia by tens of thousands of years.
Prior to this discovery, Dr Tim Maloney, a research fellow at Australia’s Griffith University, said it had been widely accepted that amputation was a guaranteed death sentence until about 10,000 years ago, when surgical procedures advanced with the development of large settled agricultural societies.
He said the successful operation suggested some form of intensive care, including regular disinfection post-operation and this implies that early people had mastered complex surgical procedures. The nature of the healing, including the clean stump showed it was caused by amputation and not an accident or animal attack.
The patient survived not just as a child, but as an adult amputee in this rainforest environment and importantly, not only does the stump lack infection, but it also lacks distinctive crushing.
“This finding very much changes the known history of medical intervention and knowledge of humanity,” Maloney said….. "the stone age surgeon must have had detailed knowledge of anatomy, including veins, vessels and nerves, to avoid causing fatal blood loss and infection".
https:/
How? My thinking on the potential presence of ancient aliens on Earth in the dim and distant past is rearing its head again. Any thoughts?
Prior to this discovery, Dr Tim Maloney, a research fellow at Australia’s Griffith University, said it had been widely accepted that amputation was a guaranteed death sentence until about 10,000 years ago, when surgical procedures advanced with the development of large settled agricultural societies.
He said the successful operation suggested some form of intensive care, including regular disinfection post-operation and this implies that early people had mastered complex surgical procedures. The nature of the healing, including the clean stump showed it was caused by amputation and not an accident or animal attack.
The patient survived not just as a child, but as an adult amputee in this rainforest environment and importantly, not only does the stump lack infection, but it also lacks distinctive crushing.
“This finding very much changes the known history of medical intervention and knowledge of humanity,” Maloney said….. "the stone age surgeon must have had detailed knowledge of anatomy, including veins, vessels and nerves, to avoid causing fatal blood loss and infection".
https:/
How? My thinking on the potential presence of ancient aliens on Earth in the dim and distant past is rearing its head again. Any thoughts?
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// ask questions of who naomi?//
whom whom, chrissakes
Medical journals have rather abandoned, first second, fourth instance od X doing Y
First modern Olympic games at Athens 1896 by Baron Coubertin. Not quite
Much Wenlock is home to the Wenlock Olympian Games. These famous games and Dr. William Penny Brookes, the founder, are thought to have inspired the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. And the old boy and the town are credited as no 1
Nitrous oxide and making over-users wibbly wobbly ? (Ab for subacute combined degeneration.
of the spinal cord, silly)
I have had great playzir in telling editors it was described before, twenty years ago (for ABers who can subtract (or "minus" or take away with confidence) here
https:/
and was completely ignored for the next two decades.
( Alot of neurologists then said, "no this hasnt occurred", as the great and good do when faced with new observations)
which brings me to:
oh Herr Planck, how did you get the old German professors to accept your exciting new ideas ?
Prof Planck - for it was he: they died
whom whom, chrissakes
Medical journals have rather abandoned, first second, fourth instance od X doing Y
First modern Olympic games at Athens 1896 by Baron Coubertin. Not quite
Much Wenlock is home to the Wenlock Olympian Games. These famous games and Dr. William Penny Brookes, the founder, are thought to have inspired the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. And the old boy and the town are credited as no 1
Nitrous oxide and making over-users wibbly wobbly ? (Ab for subacute combined degeneration.
of the spinal cord, silly)
I have had great playzir in telling editors it was described before, twenty years ago (for ABers who can subtract (or "minus" or take away with confidence) here
https:/
and was completely ignored for the next two decades.
( Alot of neurologists then said, "no this hasnt occurred", as the great and good do when faced with new observations)
which brings me to:
oh Herr Planck, how did you get the old German professors to accept your exciting new ideas ?
Prof Planck - for it was he: they died
o hahahahaha
someone wrote a paper on first first reports
( first report by X - oops sorry it was in fact done a few years ago by Y and ignored.) 31 000 y must be a record I agree
And Dr Z who wrote the paper ( firsts arent firsts) - finished with.....
The editor has informed me that this is not the first time this has been noticed.....
someone wrote a paper on first first reports
( first report by X - oops sorry it was in fact done a few years ago by Y and ignored.) 31 000 y must be a record I agree
And Dr Z who wrote the paper ( firsts arent firsts) - finished with.....
The editor has informed me that this is not the first time this has been noticed.....
Amputations are not regarded at the present time as "intricate surgery" as one just makes a skin incision, saws throught the bone and ties off the major bleeding blood vessels and then the skin sewed together.
It could be done in the days before anaesthetics in less than 2 mins.
But 30,000 years ago in Borneo amputations must have been done and almost all died of shock or infection.
This one survived......one never says never in surgery.
A knowledge of anatomy would not be needed 30,000 to perform the procedure.
Interesting find though.
It could be done in the days before anaesthetics in less than 2 mins.
But 30,000 years ago in Borneo amputations must have been done and almost all died of shock or infection.
This one survived......one never says never in surgery.
A knowledge of anatomy would not be needed 30,000 to perform the procedure.
Interesting find though.
Archeologists do have a tendency to file things into pre-existing boxes
I don't know about that - archaeologists seem to spend a lot of time announcing amazing new discoveries that will rewrite the history books, and some of them do too - like finding the exact spot where Stonehenge monoliths came from or how Gobekli Tepe got built when there weren't any towns around.
As with historians generally, none of them much likes to be told "it's been done before".
I don't know about that - archaeologists seem to spend a lot of time announcing amazing new discoveries that will rewrite the history books, and some of them do too - like finding the exact spot where Stonehenge monoliths came from or how Gobekli Tepe got built when there weren't any towns around.
As with historians generally, none of them much likes to be told "it's been done before".
I'm pleased to see that Sqad doesn't agree that this is the sort of operation that requires "detailed knowledge of anatomy" to the point that puts it beyond the reach of a plausible skill-set of ancient civilisations.
Everything below is my own musings, which therefore isn't meant to be definitive at all, just hopefully contributing to the discussion.
Still, these are the sorts of questions I'd have *before* wanting to take the "they must have had outside help", ie aliens, as a fruitful line of study:
1. As Sqad mentions, is it really necessary for this to be such a complex operation? Also, maybe the survival rate is low, but you only need one in a thousand to recover, and then you find that one in a thousand, and voila you have an amputee who survived whose body could be found 30,000 years later. What would be interesting -- but, sadly, unlikely -- to see is if it's possible to track the "failed attempts" at this surgery, ie to really get a handle on the progress of medicine at this time.
2. Following on from that, I think we tend to underestimate still how tough the human body is. We see it in animals a lot, they can recover from all sorts of horrific injuries -- sometimes because the sheer "will to live" carries them through, other times because of some stroke of luck that the injury didn't affect anything vital. Perhaps the wound was cauterised or something, so that there wasn't too much blood loss.
3. Also, in terms of sewing it up, I think we can expect that this was in the ability of such societies, because at one level it's just an extension of sewing for clothing, and I think even rudimentary stitching would be doable. Say, you know that leather is skin, leather can be stitched into clothes, skin can be stitched. It's not too much of a stretch, I think, to see this leap in logic being made.
4. Just, generally, I think it's also easy to underestimate the sophistication of ancient societies either because of a sort of "arrogance" about our modern world, or because if you don't have access to any written records then you simply can't measure it. Maybe this is the sort of thing that was at the time only taught by oral tradition -- gradual improvement at how to deal with the injury, a lot of failures before success, but when the last person in that culture dies the secret is lost with them.
5. Oh yes, also, while I think about it, isn't trepanning quite an ancient surgery technique? Break off a piece of the skull, and I can't imagine that being anything other than extremely dangerous without proper equipment and sterilisation. Apparently, it doesn't date as far back as this amputation, ie there's approximately a 20,000-year gap between this and the earliest known cases of trepanning, but we know that people quite often survived this complex, painful, and also often rather pointless operation. Is it really so much of a stretch, again, to imagine that the more logical "chop off a damaged leg" operation couldn't have occurred to someone to try, and much earlier at that?
I guess what I'm saying is that, while I can see that this could indeed be suggestive of "detailed knowledge", it's also just a single case, and could as well be ascribed to finding the one lucky survivor of a dangerous procedure out of the many hundreds of failed attempts.
* * * *
It's all fascinating, though, and shows just how much we have to learn about the prehistoric world. Like most areas of study, I'm sure we'll never run out of new things to discover!
Everything below is my own musings, which therefore isn't meant to be definitive at all, just hopefully contributing to the discussion.
Still, these are the sorts of questions I'd have *before* wanting to take the "they must have had outside help", ie aliens, as a fruitful line of study:
1. As Sqad mentions, is it really necessary for this to be such a complex operation? Also, maybe the survival rate is low, but you only need one in a thousand to recover, and then you find that one in a thousand, and voila you have an amputee who survived whose body could be found 30,000 years later. What would be interesting -- but, sadly, unlikely -- to see is if it's possible to track the "failed attempts" at this surgery, ie to really get a handle on the progress of medicine at this time.
2. Following on from that, I think we tend to underestimate still how tough the human body is. We see it in animals a lot, they can recover from all sorts of horrific injuries -- sometimes because the sheer "will to live" carries them through, other times because of some stroke of luck that the injury didn't affect anything vital. Perhaps the wound was cauterised or something, so that there wasn't too much blood loss.
3. Also, in terms of sewing it up, I think we can expect that this was in the ability of such societies, because at one level it's just an extension of sewing for clothing, and I think even rudimentary stitching would be doable. Say, you know that leather is skin, leather can be stitched into clothes, skin can be stitched. It's not too much of a stretch, I think, to see this leap in logic being made.
4. Just, generally, I think it's also easy to underestimate the sophistication of ancient societies either because of a sort of "arrogance" about our modern world, or because if you don't have access to any written records then you simply can't measure it. Maybe this is the sort of thing that was at the time only taught by oral tradition -- gradual improvement at how to deal with the injury, a lot of failures before success, but when the last person in that culture dies the secret is lost with them.
5. Oh yes, also, while I think about it, isn't trepanning quite an ancient surgery technique? Break off a piece of the skull, and I can't imagine that being anything other than extremely dangerous without proper equipment and sterilisation. Apparently, it doesn't date as far back as this amputation, ie there's approximately a 20,000-year gap between this and the earliest known cases of trepanning, but we know that people quite often survived this complex, painful, and also often rather pointless operation. Is it really so much of a stretch, again, to imagine that the more logical "chop off a damaged leg" operation couldn't have occurred to someone to try, and much earlier at that?
I guess what I'm saying is that, while I can see that this could indeed be suggestive of "detailed knowledge", it's also just a single case, and could as well be ascribed to finding the one lucky survivor of a dangerous procedure out of the many hundreds of failed attempts.
* * * *
It's all fascinating, though, and shows just how much we have to learn about the prehistoric world. Like most areas of study, I'm sure we'll never run out of new things to discover!
Victorian amputators used to pride themselves on speed. There was a story in a history magazine recently about one who achieved a 300% mortality rate. He cut off the patient's leg but it became infected and he died; he also managed to slice off his assistant's fingers with his flaying knife, ditto; and a member of the audience collapsed and died too.
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