The 31,000-year-old skeleton of a young adult found in a cave in Indonesia that is missing its left foot and part of its left leg reveal the oldest known evidence of an amputation, according to a new study.
Scientists say the amputation was performed when the person was a child — and 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, said the study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
Researchers were exploring a cave in East Kalimantan Borneo in 2020, in a rainforest region known for having some of the earliest rock art in the world, when they came across the grave, said Dr Tim Maloney, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Queensland and the study’s lead researcher.
Though much of the skeleton was intact, it was missing its left foot and the lower part of its left leg, he said. After examining the remains, the researchers concluded the foot bones weren’t missing from the grave, or lost in an accident — they had been carefully removed.
The remaining leg bone showed a clean, slanted cut that healed over, Maloney said. There were no signs of infection, which would be expected if the child’s leg had been bitten off by a creature such as 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 about six to nine more years after losing the limb, eventually dying from unknown causes as a young adult, researchers say.
This shows that the Stone Age foragers knew enough about medicine to perform the surgery without fatal blood loss or infection, the authors concluded.
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