The wound’s clean nature suggested that it had been made intentionally. When the researchers examined the tips of the bones, they didn’t find signs of an animal attack or rockfall, which would have left fracture or crush marks around the edges. A close examination of the tibia and fibula showed years of healed bone over an amputation. When they looked closer at the tip of the left leg, they saw that the tibia and fibula had been cut off, and the ends of the bone healed over. Human and Neanderthal skeletons both show evidence of healed traumatic injuries going back tens of thousands of years, and some anthropologists argue that the ability to provide medical care allowed hominids to spread across the planet.Īs Maloney and his team excavated the burial site, hoping to learn more about the people who had painted the cave at least 40,000 years ago, they noticed something odd: The skeleton was missing its left foot, while the delicate bones of the right foot were well-preserved. To tend to a critically injured person requires communities to develop medicinal knowledge and have spare resources to devote to their recovery. They were sophisticated in other ways, too: According to a description of the burial published today in the journal Nature, the young adult is the oldest human known to have survived a surgical amputation.Ĭaring for the sick and wounded is an essential part of human evolution.
The people lived on the edge of what was then a low continent called Sunda, and they were likely part of the same group of early seafarers who crossed to Australia. At the beginning of the last Ice Age, 31,000 years ago, a community in what’s now Eastern Indonesia buried a young person in the dry floor of a mountainside cave painted with handprints.
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