How was the amputation carried out and why? What was used for pain or to prevent infection? Was this operation rare or common practice? “Research like this article demonstrates that prehistoric peoples were not just left to fend for themselves.”įor all that the skeleton reveals, many questions remain. “It had long been assumed healthcare is a newer invention,” Schrenk told The Associated Press news agency in an email. The study adds to growing evidence that humans started caring for each other’s health much earlier in their history, said Alecia Schrenk, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved with the study. “Intensive post-operative nursing and care would have been vital … the wound would have regularly been cleaned, dressed and disinfected.” That suggests “detailed knowledge of limb anatomy and muscular and vascular systems”, the research team wrote in the paper. Scientists say they do not know what was used to amputate the limb or how the infection was prevented, but the person appears to have lived for about six to nine more years after the surgery, eventually dying from unknown causes as a young adult. There were no signs of infection or fracture, which would be expected from an animal attack or accident. The remaining leg bone showed a clean, slanted cut that healed over, Maloney said. After examining the remains, the researchers concluded the bones were not missing and had not been lost in an accident – they had been carefully removed. Researchers were exploring the imposing Liang Tebo cave, known for its wall paintings dating back 40,000 years, when they came across the grave in 2020.Īlthough much of the skeleton was intact, it was missing its left foot and the lower part of its left leg. “It rewrites our understanding of the development of this medical knowledge,” said Tim Maloney, an archaeologist and research fellow at Australia’s Griffith University, who led the research, which was published on Wednesday in Nature. The scientists found that the missing left foot and leg could only be explained by amputation The discovery suggests hunter-gatherers living in what is now Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province had sophisticated medical knowledge of anatomy and wound treatment.
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Previously, the earliest known amputation involved a 7,000-year-old skeleton found in France, and experts believed such operations only emerged in settled agricultural societies. A 31,000-year-old skeleton of a young adult unearthed in a cave in Indonesia provides the oldest known evidence of an amputation, according to a new study.