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Earliest known surgery was of a child in Borneo 31,000 years ago

Evidence that a child in a hunter-gatherer society survived amputation offers a remarkable insight into the origins of surgery. It challenges the current view that such procedures emerged alongside farming some 10,000 years ago.
  1. Charlotte Ann Roberts

    1. Charlotte Ann Roberts is in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University, Durham DH1 3LE, UK.

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The development of medicine was a key advance for early communities. Writing in Nature, Maloney et al.1 report skeletal evidence of the earliest known use of surgery — the successful complete amputation of the foot and partial removal of the lower leg (Fig. 1) of a child who lived at least 31,000 years ago in Borneo. This procedure occurred on the other side of the world and substantially earlier than the previous oldest known example of amputation, which was in France around 7,000 years ago2.

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Nature 609, 472-473 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02340-4

References

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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