Amputation History

It’s long been known that prehistoric people performed surgeries, based on skeletons found by archaeologists. But it turns out that surgery may have been practiced long before researchers previously thought. An article published in Nature this week describes a skeleton found of an adult that appears to have had a limb amputated as a child around 31,000 years ago. The person appears to have survived the procedure and lived perhaps as long as a decade afterward. Prior to this, the oldest known amputation was one that happened about 7,000 years ago. And it’s long been thought that surgery didn’t start happening until after humans started settling into farming communities. But this finding in Borneo upends that timeline, suggesting that surgery and the practice of medicine may significantly pre-date agriculture, making healthcare one of the oldest professions.