Evidence of Stone Age amputation forces rethink over history of surgery

January 25, 2010

The surgeon was dressed in a goat or sheep skin and used a sharpened stone to amputate the arm of his patient.

The operating theatre was not exactly Harley Street — more probably a wooden shelter — but the intervention was a success, and it has shed light on the medical talents of our Stone Age ancestors.

Scientists unearthed evidence of the surgery during work on an Early Neolithic tomb discovered at Buthiers-Boulancourt, about 40 miles (65km) south of Paris. They found that a remarkable degree of medical knowledge had been used to remove the left forearm of an elderly man about 6,900 years ago — suggesting that the true Flintstones were more developed than previously thought.

The patient seems to have been anaesthetised, the conditions were aseptic, the cut was clean and the wound was treated, according to the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap).

www.timesonline.co.uk...

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The amputation is evidence of medical knowledge in the Stone Age

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The excavation where the stone age amputation was found

The story of civilisation in 100 objects

entertainment.timesonline.co.uk...

Archeologist today are finding more and more artifacts that prove it isn't just modern man who is capable of todays technology.

mod edit, external quote tags

[edit on Sun Jan 31 2010 by DontTreadOnMe]

Explanation: S&F!

Personal Disclosure: This Thread Fully deserves the bump I'm giving it!

P.S. I encourage those who have already and those who are about to flag this thread , to add a simple 2 liner post and bump this Brilliance!

reply to post by OmegaLogos


Thank you OmegaLogos, I appreciate the S&F but am more interested in their thoughts on this amazing topic, I am pleased to see that some archaeologists are not setting this important evidence on the shelf, the more they share the more we know about ourselves and how far we have come or to be more precise how much we have lost.

Personaly i hope we have another ice man on our hands here, with so much evidence in main stream media hopefully they wont be able to shelf this story.

we need more solid fact evidence that humans had advanced knowledge before this form of civilization, we have huge amounts of myth's and legends which points to an intelligent civilization before the one we have currently, just maybe not as technological.
this is one of those finds that shows that, with minimal technology "stone age" humans were able to form complicated medical tasks....... i love it.....



Great find, S+F.
Subscribed, i'll be keeping track of this one

The discovery demonstrates that advanced medical knowledge and complex social rules were present in Europe in about 4900BC, and that major surgery was likely to have been more common than we realised, Mrs Buquet-Marcon said.

THis quote is from the opening post, think there was much that was common in those days that we are yet to discover.

Maybe older civilizations were just as smart and maybe they could have been more technologically advanced but they chose not to be and live closer to nature and more spiritually. Look at 21st century human beings. sick sick sick!

Originally posted by Zosynspiracy
Maybe older civilizations were just as smart and maybe they could have been more technologically advanced but they chose not to be and live closer to nature and more spiritually. Look at 21st century human beings. sick sick sick!

That is exactly what the Gnostic's aka: Pagans did, they worshiped nature, it was their religion. The Gnostic's were also Shaman's and developed their physic abilities on the same level as Native Americans and Yogis.

Makes you think if modern man has tabs on themselves by believing they didn't know much back then aren't we starting to find out that thought is wrong.

Thank you for posting this..

will have to read further and find out more information so I can post constructive comments... but wow... just as I thought, we (humans) were not as backward as we have been taught..

Acupuncture is the procedure of inserting and manipulating filiform needles into various points on the body to relieve pain or for therapeutic purposes.[3] The word acupuncture comes from the Latin acus, "needle", and pungere, "to prick". In Standard Chinese, acupuncture is called 针砭 (zhēnbiān), or a related word, 针灸 (zhēnjiǔ), which refers to acupuncture together with moxibustion.[4] According to traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture points are situated on meridians along which qi (a "life energy"), flows. Modern acupuncture texts present them as ideas that are useful in clinical practice and continue to inform the practice of acupuncture,[5][6] but there is no evidence to support their existence and they have not been reconciled with contemporary knowledge about biology, physics or chemistry.[7][8]

The earliest written record of acupuncture is the Chinese text Shiji (史記, English: Records of the Grand Historian) with elaboration of its history in the second century BCE medical text Huangdi Neijing (黃帝內經, English: Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon).[9] Different variations of acupuncture are practiced and taught throughout the world. Acupuncture has been the subject of active scientific research since the late 20th century[10] but it remains controversial among conventional medical researchers and clinicians.[10] Due to the invasive nature of acupuncture treatments, it is difficult to create studies that use proper scientific

en.wikipedia.org...

This is a practice I used to quit smoking and also a friend of mine got rid of life long back pain by using acupuncture....

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Acupuncture Chart, this may be off topic but it is an ancient practice that is used extensively today.

Thanks for posting this bit of info. I always find these little discoverys fascinating.

bump

reply to post by Aquarius1

Scientists unearthed evidence of the surgery during work on an Early Neolithic tomb discovered at Buthiers-Boulancourt, about 40 miles (65km) south of Paris. They found that a remarkable degree of medical knowledge had been used to remove the left forearm of an elderly man about 6,900 years ago — suggesting that the true Flintstones were more developed than previously thought.

People WAKE THE F*CK UP!!!!

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A 12.000 years old buffalo like skull was found to west of Leria river, Yakutia. The fossil was pierced by a projectile or something shot that blasted the bone at high speed, according to surveys. The skull is exposed in the paleontological museum in Moscow.

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38.000 years old found in excavation researches in 1921, Zambia. On the left side of the skull is a perfectly round hole nearly a third of an inch in diameter. Curiously, there are no radial split-lines around the hole or other marks that should have been left by a cold weapon, such as an arrow or spear. Opposite the hole, the cranium is shattered, and reconstruction of the fragments show the skull was blown from the inside out, as from a rifle shot. In fact, any slower a projectile would have produced neither the neat hole nor the shattering effect.

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240.000.000 years old soil sample found in Utah, USA, by William Meister, with a trilobite fossil smashed by a bootprint.

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12.000 years old cave painting found in Uzbequistan, by the Russian archeologist Gueorqui Chatseld. Very self-explanatory image...

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8.000 years old cave painting found in South America (???).

People you got to be f*cking kidding, reporting a prehistoric amputation made with a sharp stone, with several archeological evidences of modern technologies thousands or millions of years ago. Obviously some very serious sh*t happened in this planet before the raise of homo-sapiens and between intervals of stone-ice ages.

[edit on 31-1-2010 by ucalien]

Ayurveda doctors/practitioners were practicing surgery before the time of Christ (for example, removing cataracts etc with precision). Hehe, and I bet you didn't have to pay $30,000 for a diagnoses and procedure back then!

[edit on 31-1-2010 by whatsup]

Being an amputee myself, right leg AKA, this topic is very interesting.

I've just recently seen some news on them doing an amputation in Haiti I believe(could be wrong) on a young childs arm. with no anestetics, and crude instruments.

When I think of that, and the pain that I went through WITH the best anestetics around (put unconcious during surgery ect), When I woke up, I thought I was in a nightmare. You cannot imagine the pain. Always haveing a high threshold for pain my whole life I was completely shocked that such pain existed. To the point where suicide seemed like a very nice alternative.

The medical/scientific community still knows little (but they're makeing great strides) in the area and effects of "phantom limb pain.

It's been nearly 9 years since my surgery, and I can still feel like my leg is there right down to the tips of my toes. The doctors assured me that feeling and the excrutiating pain that went along with it, would dissapate over 6-8 months. Well it hasn't.

I believe it may have to do with how one ends up losing a limb. If say you have diabetes, theres no terrible pain in your foot (for example) just extreme swelling, maybe aching and minor pain. So folks like this have amputations and feel almost no phantom limb pain thereafter.

In my case my amputation was done, because my leg was basically burned to a cinder from the inside out (I made contact with the 3rd rail after being knocked off the LIRR train platform). So perhaps, that lasting memory of severe pain, is what is cemented into my brain, and something I might never be rid of. Some days it feels like my leg (which isn't even there) is on fire. A horrible, horrible feeling.

Very interesting subject. Also the pictures posted of what appear to definitly be a highspeed projectile, through that skull. Sooo many years ago, before firearms were invented.

Could a sling have done this? I've seen some top notch guys with a sling, and they can really get a small snone moveing. But to put a rock through someones someones skulls without ANY shattering around the entrance wound

Could that have been done many, many years after the skull was unearthed, with a modern day firearm? Maybe someone was using old skulls as target practice? I dunno.

But very intriuging stories.

Especially the level of medical know-how that far back in time.

S+F, great post.

I agree with the others, this thread deserves some attention. Thanks OP good catch S&F. This is good info which I'd probably have missed entirely if it hadn't been for you.

I hope most of us are on the same page though. This should not come as a surpise. It's also good news for some of the more exotic creation stories that do the rounds. I feel that there seems to be the beginnings of a well deserved renaissance in this subject matter and the implications it has for the history of humanity.

reply to post by ucalien


I think you're missing the point here. This story is not about who can find the oldest evidence of civilisation. Correct me if i'm wrong but aren't we concerned here with filling in pieces of a jigsaw of human civilisation in Europe. There have been many arguments with regard to what kinds of people populated europe in that time and what was their level of technology and spirituality and a whole host of other indicators. This is a good piece of the puzzle that goes against the status quo.

Very excellent find! I had heard about the Buffalo Skull a few months ago maybe (?) and I was very intrigued. I wouldn't put it past prehistoric man to be capable of such feats. The ancient Egyptians were known to perform successful brain surgeries on patients, as well as treat certain ailments.

My theory: There was an advanced civilization before homo sapiens came around, but not advanced as we would think of it. Think of the blue guys from Avatar. They were very connected to nature, and possibly had a part of their brain that was developed to possibly (GASP) use a form of natural magick, or possibly something like a psychic sense that many people in the world proclaim to have today. Maybe these ancient people used more than 10% of their brains and had higher functions that the invention of tools would have eventually weeded out over the course of tens of thousands of years through evolution.

I dunno. The cave paintings that have been found over the years are just definitive proof of something that was here long before we built nuclear arms, guns, and the internet.

Needless to say, this was a great archeological find, and I'll have to pass the article onto my brother, who is working in that field.

Great find Aquarius!

Originally posted by Aquarius1

Originally posted by Zosynspiracy
Maybe older civilizations were just as smart and maybe they could have been more technologically advanced but they chose not to be and live closer to nature and more spiritually. Look at 21st century human beings. sick sick sick!

That is exactly what the Gnostic's aka: Pagans did, they worshiped nature, it was their religion. The Gnostic's were also Shaman's and developed their physic abilities on the same level as Native Americans and Yogis.

I feel uncomfortable with this view because there is often only a positive connotation attached to it.

The problem I have is that if you take this worship of nature far enough you end up realising you're the lion at the top of the food chain and you worship no one. And soon you'll believe that everyone who is not family or useful to you is entirely expendible. Nature is not sentimental. History and biology show us that the entire bioshpere seems to be based around predation in one form or another. I believe that the elites ideas about all of us as cattle can be traced back to this worship of nature. Worship of the natural order of life and that life is always food for other life. It's a dangerous area. It can be used as an excuse for having no guilt and no morals, because we're all just animals with instincts that were given to us by mother nature.

Anyway fascinating story and I look forward to future discoveries.

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.

I think much of their dating is wrong.

Stone age only 6000 years ago?
Just maybe humans were not a primitive as they thought.

The bullet holes are interesting too.
I've never seen an explanation for them.
Maybe they just aren't as old as they like to think.

The problem of dating...read this article.
www.revisedhistory.org...