Stone Age amputee medics more advanced than previously thought
By ANITuesday, July 6, 2010
NEW DELHI - Scientists have found that amputation techniques were not primitive, but quite advanced even in the Stone Ages.
In a Neolithic site excavated in 2005 at Buthiers-Boulancourt, 40 miles south of Paris, scientists found the skeleton of an old man buried almost 7,000 years ago.
Tests showed an intentional and successful amputation in which a sharpened flint was used to cut the man’s humerus bone above the trochlea indent - the patient was anaesthetized too.
The tests also revealed the absence of any infection and that the patient survived the operation, and although he suffered from osteoarthritis, he lived for months if not years afterward.
According to the Daily Mail, researcher Cecile Buquet-Marcon said that pain-killing plants such as the hallucinogenic Datura were possibly used, and other plants such as sage were probably used to clean the wound, reports The Epoch Times.
The findings are published in Antiquity Journal. (ANI)
