Human bones from a karst cave on Borneo tell an extraordinary medical success story. About 31,000 years ago, someone amputated a child's foot so skillfully that the child lived for several more years after the operation. This was concluded by a working group led by Tim Ryan Maloney from Griffith University in the Australian state of Queensland from the finds in the Liang Tebo cave in eastern Borneo. As the team reported in "Nature", the left foot above the ankle was cut off with a smooth, oblique cut, and newly grown bone covered the cut surfaces.
In addition to the healing traces at the bone ends, the differences in the bones of both legs also show that a long time had passed since the amputation. While the bones of the healthy leg were normally developed, the bones of the severed lower leg did not grow further and were even partially broken down. The person about 20 years old during her death had probably already lost the foot in childhood. The find is around 24,000 years older than the oldest evidence of surgical intervention in a person so far and shows that groups of people already had anatomical and medical knowledge extensive in the Pleistocene.
For a successful amputation, especially in the era before the invention of the antibiotics, it is not enough to just cut off a part of the body. The risk of dying from shock, blood loss or an infected wound is great. The fact that a child survived such an intervention 31,000 years ago indicates that there were already knowledge of the situation of the blood vessels and other anatomical structures, as well as techniques to close the wound, and possibly also knowledge of antibiotic natural substances. So far, most experts had assumed that such techniques only arose in sedentary companies.
The oldest evidence of a successful amputation comes from an agrarian society 7000 years ago in today's France. In the case of groups of poachers, such serious surgical interventions seemed rather unrealistic. In addition to medical knowledge, the consequences of such interventions also require a considerable logistical effort for a temporarily moving group of people in the long term. Said group must also have ensured that the injured child was cared for and cared for in the time after the operation. In addition, the one-legged person may have been dependent on special support for years. The careful burial suggests that she was probably not an outsider despite her disability. She was buried in a squat position, and limestone blocks over her head and arms marked the burial place in the cave, decorated with rock paintings.
