Brutal Facts About Amputation Throughout History

Publish date: 2024-05-07

It's hard to imagine prehistoric societies conducting surgeries and amputations, but recovered ancient bones tell us they did. They likely weren't frequent and the chances of surviving were probably very low, but archeologists have proof that our ancestors were already performing quite advanced surgical procedures thousands of years ago. 

The oldest of those surgeries was an amputation that occurred over 30,000 years ago in Borneo, according to a 2022 study published in Nature. The bone remains, found inside a cave, belonged to a young adult of around 19 or 20 years of age. After close inspection, researchers realized the skeleton was missing the lower third of the leg, which had been amputated using a clean cut. Because of the obvious healing of the bone, scientists also estimate the amputation had occurred at least six years before death, during childhood.

Before this finding, the oldest amputation on record was "just" 7,000 years old and belonged to a Neolithic male found in France, according to a 2007 report published in Nature. Here too, scientists suspected a surgical amputation of the lower leg many years before death. In the book "The Rehabilitation of the Amputee," Dr. Lawrence W. Friedmann looks at amputations in ancient cultures, including ancient Peruvian civilizations, the Inuit people, and the Dama tribe in Africa — all of which seem to have performed amputations in an effort to save somebody's life.

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