Surgery is older than farming itself

Researchers at Griffith University excavated a 31,000-year-old skeleton in a Borneo cave missing its lower left leg, with bone evidence showing the limb had been deliberately removed, not lost to an accident or predator.

Tim Maloney's team found the remaining leg bone had a clean, healed edge consistent with a surgical cut rather than a crushing injury or bite, and the bone remodeling matched clinical cases of amputations that healed without infection. The individual, who died near age 20, had survived the operation by at least six years.

Whoever performed the procedure understood anatomy well enough to prevent fatal blood loss and manage wound care well enough to prevent fatal infection, some 20,000 years before agriculture or writing existed. The finding pushed the earliest known evidence of successful surgery back by about 24,000 years, though some researchers have proposed the bone changes could instead reflect an unusually healed traumatic injury.

A hunter-gatherer surgeon, 31,000 years early.