A close examination of the tibia and fibula showed years of healed bone over an amputation.From T. Maloney et al., Nature, 2022.
Posted on 09/13/2022 8:44:44 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The discovery of a young adult who lived for years with an amputated leg pushes back the first documented limb surgery by 20,000 years.
At the beginning of the last Ice Age, 31,000 years ago, a community in what’s now Eastern Indonesia buried a young person in the dry floor of a mountainside cave painted with handprints. The people lived on the edge of what was then a low continent called Sunda, and they were likely part of the same group of early seafarers who crossed to Australia. They were sophisticated in other ways, too: According to a description of the burial published today in the journal Nature, the young adult is the oldest human known to have survived a surgical amputation...
As Maloney and his team excavated the burial site, hoping to learn more about the people who had painted the cave at least 40,000 years ago, they noticed something odd: The skeleton was missing its left foot, while the delicate bones of the right foot were well-preserved. When they looked closer at the tip of the left leg, they saw that the tibia and fibula had been cut off, and the ends of the bone healed over...
Even if this loss of a limb was accidental, “it is still significant that they managed to keep the person alive,” says Rebecca Gowland, an expert in human skeletal remains at Durham University who was not involved in the research. But she says she doesn’t have any reason to doubt the interpretation of the amputation. “I’ve seen a number of amputated limbs, and it looks like it could well be a healed amputation.” she says.
(Excerpt) Read more at popsci.com ...
A close examination of the tibia and fibula showed years of healed bone over an amputation.From T. Maloney et al., Nature, 2022.
Oldest medical amputation on record was performed on a Stone Age child in Borneo 31,000 years ago
By Jennifer Nalewicki published 4 days ago
https://www.livescience.com/ancient-leg-amputation-borneo
Maybe somebody just had a leg snack.
His name was ‘Neal’. Perhaps he identified as a woman and called herself ‘Eileen’. 😉
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