A Child Survived Surgery 31,000 Years Ago. How?

In Borneo, 31,000 years ago, somebody cut off the lower part of a child's left leg as an operation. There was no hospital, no antibiotic and no painkiller we would recognise. The child lived for six to nine more years and died at about 19 or 20.

That is 24,000 years before the next operation we know about. Somebody knew where the big blood vessels were. Somebody kept the wound clean for weeks. Somebody carried, fed and washed that child for years.

So what did ancient humans do about pain? Less than you think, and more than you think.

Pain was like weather

Old skeletons show it everywhere: bones that healed crooked, abscesses, arthritis in people in their thirties. Food was ground between stones, so it was full of grit, and teeth wore down to the nerve. Almost every adult had toothache.

Neanderthal skeletons show injuries to the head, neck and upper body. The pattern has been compared to modern rodeo riders, which tells you how close they got to the animals they hunted.

The plants that really worked

The best evidence comes from teeth. Hard plaque traps what was in the mouth and keeps DNA for tens of thousands of years.

One Neanderthal in Spain had a tooth abscess and a stomach parasite. In his plaque researchers found poplar, which contains salicylic acid, the chemical aspirin is made from. They also found the kind of mould that penicillin comes from.

This is one man's teeth. It does not prove a pharmacy. Most researchers think he knew what he was doing. Some are not convinced, and that is a fair argument.

Willow bark, which has the same chemical, turns up in many places. And the opium poppy was being grown in Europe 6,000 years ago.

Holes in the skull

People cut holes in each other's skulls for thousands of years, in Europe, Africa, South America and the Pacific.

Bone that grows back leaves a smooth, rounded edge. Many of these skulls have that edge, so the person lived for months or years afterwards. Some skulls have two holes or more.

The best guess for why is head injury. A crack in the skull can press on the brain, and taking the pressure off helps. We still do that operation. It was done on people who were awake.

Tattoos over sore joints

A man who died on a mountain about 5,000 years ago was kept by the ice, skin and all. He has 61 tattoos, short lines and crosses, mostly on his lower back, knees, ankles and wrist. His bones show worn joints in the same places.

It looks like treatment. It is not proven. They could be decoration, status or belief.

The first dentists

At Mehrgarh, in what is now Pakistan, a graveyard between 7,000 and 9,000 years old held 11 drilled teeth from nine people. Every one is a back tooth, which nobody can see, so it was not decoration. Four had decay beside the hole.

The tool was a bow drill with a flint tip. Researchers rebuilt one. It makes a hole in tooth enamel in under a minute. The same drills were found with beads. These people were bead makers who turned their skill to teeth, and they kept doing it for 1,500 years.

Mostly, they treated the person

Add up the medicine and it is thin. Against a lifetime of toothache and broken bones, they had some bark, some poppies and a hole in the head.

The strongest evidence is a Neanderthal man from a cave in Iraq. He was about 40 when he died. He had a crushed face and was probably blind in one eye. His right arm was withered. He walked badly and may have been deaf. All of it had healed long before he died.

He could not hunt, hear a warning or run. Somebody fed him and moved him when the group moved, for years.

The short answer

They lived with far more pain than you ever will, and they had a few real remedies. But a one-armed, half-blind man lived to 40, and a child with an amputated leg lived nine more years. Neither happens without other people. Mostly, they had each other. That is the actual finding.