TOKYO: According to scientists, a skeleton found in a remote area of Borneo rewrites the history of ancient medicine and provides evidence that amputation surgery was successfully performed some 31,000 years ago.
The earliest known amputation, a 7,000-year-old skeleton discovered in France, was previously thought to have only occurred in developed agricultural communities.
The discovery also implies that East Kalimantan in Indonesia’s modern province of the Stone Age hunter-gatherers had extensive medical knowledge of anatomy and wound care.
Tim Maloney, a research fellow at Australia’s Griffith University and the project’s principal investigator, said the findings “rewrites our understanding of the emergence of this medical knowledge.”
