A Stone Age child living 31,000 years ago in what is now Borneo seems to have had their foot and part of their leg carefully amputated and survived for several years afterwards.
This suggests that the hunter-gatherer community the person was part of had the medical skills to stop someone bleeding to death or dying from infection – both common hazards of amputation before modern medicine, says at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.
Before the latest finding, the earliest known case of a successful amputation – one that wasn’t fatal – involved a , found in France, whose arm had been removed above the elbow.
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It has been suggested that medical knowledge started advancing with the dawn of farming, about 12,000 years ago, which allowed larger, settled communities to hand down their skills. But the Borneo skeleton suggests that at least some earlier hunter-gatherers had sophisticated medical techniques, says Aubert.
The skeleton was discovered in 2020 during the excavation of a cave called Liang Tebo, which is accessible only by sea, in East Kalimantan in the Indonesian portion of Borneo.
The individual, named Tebo 1, was 19 or 20 years old when they died, judging from their bones. Their sex couldn’t be determined because the skeleton has some features of both sexes and their DNA hasn’t yet been sequenced.
Aubert and his colleagues were surprised to find that the person’s left leg had been cut off above the foot, and the bones showed signs of healing, indicating that they survived for between six and nine years after the loss of the foot. This meant the person was between about 10 and 14 when it happened.
A deliberate amputation seems most likely because the two lower leg bones have a relatively clean cut, as if from a blade, rather than a crushing injury or a predator’s bite, say the researchers. The remaining lower leg bones are thinner than normal and are fused together, perhaps because the person put weight on their stump.
The bones showed no signs of infection, which suggests that the wound had been regularly cleaned and disinfected, perhaps with antiseptic plant extracts, says at the University of Sydney, who was also part of the study. “You’re looking at quite advanced forms of healthcare,” she says.
When the individual died, it seems someone deliberately buried them, judging by the different kind of earth that was lying above the skeleton, as well as limestone rocks placed over the head and each arm. They had been laid on their back and buried with a ball of red ochre, used as paint at the time, and small flakes of quartz, sometimes used as tools.
In 2018, some of the nearby caves were found to have striking hunting scenes painted on their walls in ochre, thought to have been made about 40,000 years ago.
at the University of Toulouse in France says it wouldn’t be impossible to survive an amputation without the help of other people – but the find is an interesting glimpse into life in this Stone Age group. “They must have had an understanding that it was necessary to remove the limb for survival,” he says.
Nature
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