According to a recent research, the earliest known example of an amputation is the young adult skeleton discovered in a cave in Indonesia that is missing its left foot and half of its left leg.
According to scientists, the amputation was done while the “patient” was a youngster, and he or she continued to live for many years as an amputee. The research, which was published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that the archaic operation may demonstrate that people were developing new medical techniques considerably earlier than previously believed.
According to Tim Maloney, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia and the study’s principal investigator, researchers discovered the burial while excavating a cave in Borneo, an area of the jungle recognized for having some of the oldest rock art in the world.
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, Maloney said. 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 six to nine more years after losing the limb, eventually dying from unknown causes as a young adult, researchers say.
According to the scientists, this demonstrates that ancient foragers had a basic understanding of medicine and could execute the procedure without risking deadly blood loss or infection. Researchers suggest that a sharp stone instrument may have been used to make the cut, and they point out that some of the abundant local plant life has medical capabilities. They don’t know what sort of equipment was used to amputate the leg or how infection was averted. In addition, the community would have had to care for the kid for years following since it would not have been simple for an amputee to survive the challenging environment.
Maloney said during a press conference that this pioneering procedure “rewrites the history of human medical knowledge and advances.”
Before this discovery, the oldest known case of an amputation was a French farmer who had a portion of his forearm amputated 7,000 years ago. According to the study’s authors, scientists previously believed that once humans settled into agricultural cultures approximately 10,000 years ago, complex medical procedures began to emerge.
Alecia Schrenk, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who was not involved in the study, stated that this research adds to the mounting evidence that people began putting one another’s health first far earlier in human history.
“It had long been assumed healthcare is a newer invention,” Schrenk said in an email. “Research like this article demonstrates that prehistoric peoples were not just left to fend for themselves.”