Evidence of Stone Age amputation forces rethink over history of surgery

Originally posted by ArMaP
I am not much surprised with this, after all, trepanation was done in 6500 BC, so if they could cut part of the skull bone without killing the person in the process it's not a great surprise that they could make successful amputations.

But it's always good to see something new in any science.

Agree'd, and wholeheartedly.

Here's a wonderful TED video by Catherine Mohr on the past, present, and future of surgery. It really puts things in perspective, because she touches on the amazing sophistication within the context of how primitive and base it was compared to later medical practices.

Now we've got the dawn of interventional surgery here. What is astonishing about this is even though we don't know really how much of this was intended to be religious, or how much of it was intended to be theraputic, what we can tell is that these patients lived! Judging by the healing on the borders of these holes, they lived days, months, years following trephanation. And so what we are seeing is evidence of a refined technique, that was being handed down over thousands and thousands of years, all over the world. This arose independently at sites everywhere, that had no communication to one another. We really are seeing the dawn of interventional surgery.

Keep in mind also that the "Stone Age" is more of a layman's term for a broad spectrum of time periods marked by technological and cultural advancement. Skull trephanation & the OP's amputations occurred during the Neolithic period - the last and (IIRC) the shortest "Stone Age" period spanning approx. 10kya to 4kya. It was preceded by the upper, middle, and lower Paleolithic eras. The "Late Stone Age" (upper paleolithic + neolithic) began about 40kya. The "middle" mesolithic began about 300kya, and the lower paleolithic beginning about 2.5mya.

For reference, AMH (anatomically modern humans) appeared about 200 ~ 150kya, and we didn't migrate out of Africa into Neanderthal territory in Europe until about 50~40kya. So the "Stone Age" refers to a time when our genus (Homo) emerged with Australopithecines like Homo Habilis, and it ended with the emergence of agriculture, animal domestication, pottery, copper mining/metallurgy.

reply to post by Lasheic


Thank you Lasheric, * for you, this video certainly puts things into perspective, I had microscopic surgery in 1987, a tubal ligation, I didn't realize how new it was then. No pain, had it in the morning and was actually back to work that afternoon..

reply to post by Aquarius1


Thank you for the info. I will take a look at the Kindle store. Yes I agree, I love the feel of a real book, but as I travel a lot, I find the Kindle far more practicle as I can carry about 1000 books in one small device.

Thanks again.

Edited for spelling. Sorry

[edit on 2/2/2010 by TheLoneArcher]

Originally posted by Aquarius1
reply to post by truthseeker1984

 

The wholesale destruction of the Alexandria and other library's took place in the period 150 AD-400 AD, the Dark Ages were alive and well.

... er, no. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria (including the Serapeum & Cesarion, as well as other libraries of the ancient world) occurred progressively over the course of several centuries, and has more to do with economics, political disputes, & religion than it does with academic discourse and the reasoned advancement of ideas. The fires merely punctuated the slow and progressive atrophy and neglect.

But yet you have the audacity to sit here and throw your torch in with the rest of the modern library burners by trying to chip away at the Scientific Method which has been refined and honed from it's origins in those libraries into a MONSTER of discovery beyond the wildest dreams of those who preceded it. Men like Alhazen picked up where the philosophers and scholars of old left off at and carried on the advancement of knowledge and understanding forward.

Science and Skepticism isn't some dogmatic abstract concept the way you seem to want to imply... it's a self-improving methodology. It's dominant because science works. It generates knowledge, and knowledge is power. But it does not generate platitudes or instantaneous absolute truths. It is a process of error-correction generating ever more detailed and concordant levels of resolution to our understanding of the universe.

The problem with this statement is that the scientific method is finite, you cannot prove everything by using it.

As already related to you by one poster, Science isn't about proving anything. It's about falsification. If you don't even know, or don't want to acknowledge, even the most basic fundamentals of Science... what gives you any credibility when you attempt to criticize it. Especially when it generates technology we ALL benefit from, or are affected by.



We use the best of what we have, even if those best explanations are incomplete or contain errors. We go with the explanations which explains the most evidence, while being refuted by the least amount of evidence. If you want to scratch in the dirt for absolute truths, that's your shortcoming. Not a shortcoming of science. You want someone to spoon feed you so called "truth"? Stick with religion. Science isn't in the business of spoon feeding you the knowledge it gains, because robots that only accept what they're told don't generate innovation or advance knowledge. Science is in the business of generating knowledge, and that requires understanding on at least some level. An understanding which cannot be forced onto you, because it requires your cooperation in order to get you to think.

... and that's the tough part.

"Thinking is hard work, which is why you don't see a lot of people doing it."