NEW YORK (AP) — The 31,000-year-old skeleton of a young adult found in a cave in Indonesia that is missing its left foot & part of its left leg reveal the oldest known evidence of an amputation.
Scientists say the amputation was performed when the person was a child & that the “patient” went on to live for years as an amputee. The prehistoric surgery could show that humans were making medical advances much earlier than previously thought.
Researchers were exploring a cave in Borneo, when they came across the grave.
Though much of the skeleton was intact, it was missing its left foot and the lower part of its left leg, he explained. After examining the remains, the researchers concluded the foot bones weren’t missing from the grave, or lost in an accident — they were carefully removed.
The remaining leg bone showed a clean, slanted cut that healed over. There were no signs of infection, which would be expected if the child had gotten its leg bitten off by a creature like a crocodile. And there were also no signs of a crushing fracture, which would have been expected if the leg had snapped off in an accident.
The person appears to have lived for around 6 to 9 more years after losing the limb, eventually dying from unknown causes as a young adult, researchers say.
This shows that the prehistoric foragers knew enough about medicine to perform the surgery without fatal blood loss or infection. Researchers don’t know what kind of tool was used to amputate the limb, or how infection was prevented — but they speculate that a sharp stone tool may have made the cut & point out that some of the rich plant life in the region has medicinal properties.
Also, the community would have had to care for the child for years afterward, since surviving the rugged terrain as an amputee wouldn’t have been easy.
This early surgery “rewrites the history of human medical knowledge & developments."
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