Some 31,000 years ago in the misty rainforests of the island of Borneo, a limb was severed with a stone tool—to save a young life.
The oldest life-saving surgery was performed on the island of Borneo 24,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to Indonesian and Australian researchers. Their findings, which have just been published in Nature, are based on a detailed examination of bone remains found in a burial site unearthed in 2020.
The scientists say that the partial lack of limbs of the Stone Age man buried in the Liang Tebo cave in the eastern part of Borneo was not an accident, but the result of surgery.
Based on the growth of the leg bone and the evidence of healing, it is clear that the patient not only recovered after the operation, but lived for at least 6-9 years and died only in his late teens and early twenties, archaeologist Andika Arief Drajat Priyatno, a member of the team that carried out both the excavation and the post-operative studies, explained to Science.
The charcoal remains found in the sediment layers above and below the tomb, and the dating of a molar, all indicate that the surgical intervention was performed 31,000 years ago on a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe. So far, the oldest amputation was thought to be an operation carried out 7,000 years ago in what is now France, where a man’s entire arm had to be cut off by surgeons of the time.
The findings illuminate both the medical expertise and compassion of the pioneering hunter-gatherers who populated Southeast Asia at this time, says Charlotte Roberts, a bioarchaeologist at Durham University who was not involved in the project but—as a former nurse—is familiar with the procedure. “We cannot doubt they were very sophisticated.”
The research team was not able to clearly establish whether the amputation was necessary because of disease or a traumatic injury. Nor have they determined how ancient surgeons of Borneo managed to keep the stump from becoming infected in the tropical environment, although it is suspected that they used a now-forgotten medicinal plant from the rainforest to do so. They likely used a stone or bone tool to cut through the leg, although the team hasn’t yet found the Stone Age equivalent of a bone saw.
The researchers are hoping that the site, known for the world’s oldest cave paintings, will yield razor-sharp stone tools that allow for such high surgical precision.