Byzantine warrior with gold-threaded jaw unearthed in Greece | Hacker News Reader

Byzantine warrior with gold-threaded jaw unearthed in Greece

livescience.com

218 pointsdiodorus100 comments

"The wire is long gone, but Agelarakis suspects it was gold. There was no evidence of a silver alloy, which would have left grayish discoloration, nor were there traces of a patina or greenish cupric acid stains that would have been left by copper or bronze wires, he found.

"It must have been some kind of gold thread, a gold wire or something like that, as is recommended in the Hippocratic corpus that was compiled in the fifth century B.C.," Agelarakis said. Gold is soft and pliable but strong and nontoxic, he added, making it a good choice for this type of medical treatment."

That's pretty thin evidence, it may just as easily have been sheepguts (used for violin strings, for instance, in spite of being called catgut!).

Wouldn’t using dead flesh increase the risk of infection?

In the article, it’s also mentioned that Hippocrates recommended using gold, and many of his teachings were still followed in Byzantine times.

So what’s your next theory? Gold sounds fairly plausible to me.

I was kind of skeptical too, but then I found this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catgut_suture#History:

> Gut strings were being used as medical sutures as early as the 3rd century AD as Galen, a prominent Greek physician from the Roman Empire, is known to have used them.[4]

> Catgut suture is a type of surgical suture that is naturally degraded by the body's own proteolytic enzymes

It couldn't be an organic suture, unless it was supposed to last very little (on wiki it says 90 days). Also only something study like a metal could hold a bone in place reliably, I imagine.

90 days would probably be enough for a bone to set. But given that the wiring was threaded between the teeth, the sutures would be subject to the digestive enzymes of the mouth, which are significantly more aggressive than anything outside of the digestive system.

They could have periodically replaced it if it was only wrapped around the teeth. Changing a bandage is a pretty normal part of medical care. Changing the cast periodically is a routine part of modern treatments for club foot in children.

The assumption that it had to last X amount of time is questionable.

I agree, but another problem with gut is that it stretches under load when moist -- one of the issues with catgut strings on instruments is that they can't hold a tune, and that's much worse on hot & humid days (digression, they sound great though... much like nylon). Gold is also malleable, but can take quite a bit more tension before failure and work-hardens where catgut undergoes plastic deformation.

The other point I'm less certain of is that the discovery was based on dental calculus... I suspect that this wouldn't have been so pronounced if the thread was replaced frequently.

Thank you for that very informative comment.

To make gut, you have to clean it and stretch it and dry it first. By then it's about as clean as anything was back then.

Boil it just before use.

That might soften it too much.

More likely gut, which was still used well into my lifetime.

As for a metal, silver would have been a better choice than gold for both mechanical and anti-infective reasons.

Article says they didn't use silver based on the evidence (no discoloration)

I saw that. If there is no residue gold is a good candidate. I merely meant that silver would have been better than gold.

Silver oxidizes readily however. Also more brittle.

Silver, gold and copper are all known to kill germs, which would be a feature in medical uses. If we want to more or less wildly speculate (which the article is essentially doing), then let's guess that chelation was prescribed post surgery to remove the metal residue and this is the explanation for a lack of residue.

Now we can easily claim it could have been silver or copper, no real proof required.

I think it's vastly more likely they used a technique that had been around for at least 1,800 years over one that was going to be invented around 250 years later.

I have no idea if your figures are correct and I'm not entirely sure what you think was invented 250 years later.

I'm not trying to pretend I have a better theory. I'm only trying to point out that our knowledge of what actually happened is limited and the article could be better written.

I don't know why people here seem to have an issue with those criticisms. (shrug)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelation_therapy

Why don't people like your criticism? Maybe because you're trying to position yourself as smarter than the experts, but with ideas that take 30 seconds research to prove unfeasible.

Cilantro, coriander and coconut oil all move metals. I see no reason they couldn't have had a known means to remove metal stains from teeth well before we record the officially recognized modern discovery of chelation therapy.

I used the word chelation as a convenience, shorthand for "some means to remove metals from the system."

I'm not positioning myself as smarter than any experts. I'm positioning myself as critical of the flaws in the article.

And if you had an example that was attested in the region by that time period, you would have the start of a convincing theory.

You seem to have missed the part where I stated bluntly I'm not pretending to have a better theory. I'm only pointing out that "It was gold" is supposition, not fact.

I'm hardly the only person here making that point. I don't know why it's getting so much push back. The article itself makes it clear they don't actually know, but then wants to talk as if the conclusion is certain. It's absolutely not.

I think it's that this comes off as being unnecessarily caustic:

>Now we can easily claim it could have been silver or copper, no real proof required.

Nobody is claiming anything has been proved. It's just a theory.

Silver is not stable and becomes reactive.

Chromic guy sutures are still used everyday in hospitals across the country in certain surgeries. They dissolve very rapidly.

Romans perfected plastic surgery because of gladiators. (Owners take care of their slaves, which are valuable.) They even used obsidian blades, which reduces scarring. That skill was lost for almost 2,000 years.

So it's not a big leap that medical staff at that time were experimenting with sutures.

‘That skill was lost for almost 2,000 years.’

Only in the territories of the former Roman empire. Usage of obsidian blades has been recorded elsewhere in the world in the intervening time.

I would imagine they meant the skill of plastic surgery, though I'm not sure either way if that's true either. I suspect not, depending on the definition.

I always vaguely assumed "plastic surgery" had some relation to plastic the material, but it doesn't. It refers to shaping/remodelling of living tissue and the medical use of the term predates the invention of the material [1].

So I could well imagine ancients doing things that would count as "plastic surgery". I rather doubt they "perfected" it, though...

[1] Wikipedia says so, must be true :-) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_surgery

I mean various cultures have performed various kinds of cosmetic surgical procedures for centuries; the Romans weren’t even the first to do so

After battle in most countries in the past, you either lived or died as one cohort.

However, the Romans had enough patients over a continuing period of time to perfect plastic surgery.

So I think you're confusing emergency surgery and piercings with the art of plastic surgery.

If you think anatomical knowledge was universal, that's not true either. Japanese doctors were ashamed when they saw the first anatomy book - they had known nothing beforehand.

The US had to dig up bodies from graves at night for decades to draw those books.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23788147/

Indeed. Why would the gold vanish? Isn't the property it's most famous for that it's extremely resistant to corrosion and general unreactiveness?

They took the wire wrapped around his teeth off once the bones healed.

Hm, yeah, then it makes sense that there wouldn't be any traces.

They did mention that there were mitigations to prevent the knot tied in the wire from scratching the cheek. Would they have taken similar mitigations for a material like animal guts?

  "In one of the dentitions, I saw that the tooth was filed a little bit so that the knot that was tied in the wire would not scratch the cheek," Agelarakis said. "It's very sophisticated — it's flabbergasting."

I have no idea either way, and in fact the researcher may have even been extrapolating too far in this case as well.

Let's not be completely shocked by capable, ingenious ancestors. Even in the ~190K years before we settled down, those people had brains identical to yours and mine.

And on the other hand, if you read some pre-Enlightenment things, it's apparent just how powerful (actual, accurate) knowledge and reason are. Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about gravity until Newton. Imagine that the very basics of what we know and how we think today were out there, and we had the brains, but the knowledge was mostly undeveloped for ~199,000 of the 200,000 years of humanity's existence.

So it takes more than brains. (Yes, I'm simplifying a very great deal.)

> Even in the ~190K years before we settled down, those people had brains identical to yours and mine.

Humans had larger brains in hunter & gatherer times. Similar to domesticated animals, it got smaller once we settled down and started agriculture.

I don’t think the correlation between brain size and general intelligence is that strong. Maybe the hunter gatherer used a bigger part of his brain to quickly and accurately interpret impressions, to find the food and not become food himself. The domestic man might have been better at tasks like figuring out how much of his seeds he could eat and how much he must save to plant next spring, even with a slightly smaller brain.

> Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about gravity until Newton.

It was only one hundred or so years between Copernicus and Newton. And it looks like in that time Hooke and possibly others figured out that the movement of the new planetary model was because of gravity but it was Newton who mathematically proved it. That's pretty fast, really.

> That's pretty fast, really.

Pretty fast if you start the clock at Copernicus, not so fast if you start it 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out.

You know that Newton didn't "discover gravity," right? He discovered how it explained planetary motion.

And it's not fair to start the clock before we got the heliocentric theory (although Aristarchus of Samos gets an honorable mention).

As I said, I'm simplifying a great deal. I imagine people before Newton noticed that if you don't hold things up, they fall.

> Our ancestors 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out.

Newton had to invent calculus to make the proof.

You're not simplifying anything; you just got confused. And that's ok, honestly. There is literally not a person on this planet, now or ever, who didn't have holes in their knowledge or had something confused. It happens.

Come on, you know what he meant. Newton was the first to discover the laws of gravity, even though we still do not understand how gravity works and even though primitive animals can "discover" gravity.

What he said: not so fast if you start it 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out.

What I said: what Newton formulated was not “things fall down”.

And you’re taking the time to correct.. me?

The tone implies that you think the first statement is wrong in some way, but it's still not clear why.

Their comment was bring it back around to the original topic of the thread: the entire scope of homo sapiens sapiens existence and how long it took us to figure things out in relation to that.

You're trying to limit the scope to just the time period where the rest of the necessary knowledge had been discovered, while everyone else is counting the discovery of that background knowledge as part of the process.

Babies like to play that game where they'll drop a spoon or something from their highchair as many times as you'll keep handing it to them. I like to call this "gravity testing".

Most parents like to call it "patience testing" :-)

The Orphics had a heliocentric model of the universe before Aristarchus; in fact, the Derveni Papyrus, one of the oldest witnesses to Orphic thought, is actually a commentary on Orphic literature that interprets it all as physical allegory. Only Dionysus knows where the Orphics got that stuff, along with what we now call astrology: from the Phoenicians perhaps? Someone synthesizing Babylonian and Egyptian observations?

>Pretty fast if you start the clock at Copernicus, not so fast if you start it 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out.

Until the invention of writing, all knowledge was conveyed via oral traditions.

As such, the work of Copernicus and Newton would have been impossible for the humans of 10-15,000 years ago, since both required both recorded knowledge and thinking about planetary bodies as well as centuries of recorded planetary movements.

Without the benefit of recorded history of science, technology and the natural world, those folks would never have been able to accomplish their good works, as Newton himself (as well as many others prior to him) put forward[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...

When you think about it, the amount of necessary prior knowledge is massive. You have to know that planets have an elliptical orbit. Except for Mercury, all five classically known planets (and the Earth) have eccentricity of only a few percents (and Mercury is pretty hard to observe), so you need someone (that is, Tycho Brahe) who could spend years looking at the night sky, recording the precise location of each planet, enough math for someone to match it to an elliptical orbit observed from another (= Earth's) elliptical orbit, and a society that can support such a "useless" hobby.

Someone else brought up planetary orbits as a prerequisite. Is there no other way to work out the laws of gravity? Again, we're talking about 200,000 years.

But yes, there's the larger point that Newton also needed mathematics and other things. And the laws of gravity might not be the perfect example of my point, but my point isn't about Newton or gravity.

I think there's no other way. You have to observe the fact that the attractive force obeys the inverse square law. That's not measurable with experiments here on earth without extremely advanced modern instruments, so that makes it's effects only really observable on the motion of astronomical bodies. Historically this was the observation that orbits follow elliptical paths. Absent that you'd need some other observation that would lead you to the same conclusion.

Very insightful hypothesis, thank you.

I often wonder how close the ancients were to all the knowledge we take for granted.

So much lost forever in all those burned libraries.

You can see societies that lack the knowledge even today. You can see that even in 'scientific' societies, many people lack that knowledge ...

They were too busy not dying of starvation to think about gravity.

Wut... This guy is from the 14th century, which is a relatively modern era, where gun powder was starting to being used. This is just a century before the start of the renaissance, and we are not talking about thousands of years ago.

Anatomically modern vocal chords only developed sometime between ~80000 to ~40000 BCE. So although that’s still quite a lot of time, it’s less than what is implied with cranial structure.

It’s actually surprising how late and relatively sudden vocal chords developed compared to the rest of the body, as what ‘humans’ had prior was totally incapable of modern speech. It’s an unresolved mystery I believe.

Wow we must have been brilliant in other ways that we can't even imagine

Where did you get that range from? Anatomically modern humans are generally considered to predate at least 200kya and most of the synthetic literature I've read considers speech likely in archaic humans (otherwise a huge, unwieldy tongue doesn't make much sense). It's also pretty hard to get morphology timelines as restricted as 40k years, especially with soft tissues and the inherent preservation issues.

it is possible to speak without vocal cords, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language

Very cool. Also there are click languages. Given how much harder clicks are to regular vocalization, I wonder if they could be the remainders of some earlier languages before human vocalizations fully developed.

> So it takes more than brains.

yep, it takes society. Newton's law is not Newton's law, its a mental state of a bunch of communicating homo sapiens. Had he died of a pandemic somebody else would have "discovered" it in a decade or two.

I broadly agree and many discoveries are made independently at the same time, after that ~199,000ky delay (including some of Newton's, such as calculus).

But what is "society"? What are you proposing as the mechanism?

it is the quality of the communication channels (the signal to noise ratio) between individuals. Diffusion of high quality information (from any early age) is what enables individuals to both internalize state-of-the-art collective mental models and incrementally contribute their own bit.

in theory with the use of digital networks we should have a quantum leap forward but I am not sure we have seen yet any dividend of that. our collective (digitally intermediated) brain has been hijacked by less noble objectives

Very interesting ideas, thanks. At least today, your theory played out.

>in theory with the use of digital networks we should have a quantum leap forward but I am not sure we have seen yet any dividend of that. our collective (digitally intermediated) brain has been hijacked by less noble objectives

It's not just less noble objectives. With high quality information available, people still choose poor info or mis/disinfo. Nobody I know is interested in quality information, even very educated people. Even here on HN, most sources are Wikipedia.

Bronze worked well for weapons, but was rare. Iron democratized the making of weapons, available almost everywhere on Earth except Japan.

But watch modern people try to smelt iron on Youtube in their backyard.

Very difficult and time-consuming, and very toxic.

Iron smelter staff around 1900 only lived to maybe age 30 before their lungs gave out.

Article mentions this—he clearly must have been a person of importance to get this kind of treatment. Reading this kind of story makes me immensely grateful to be a nobody alive at this time and place. Hopefully future generations will similarly look back at us with pity for the relative barbarism and deprivation we endure.

This is really fascinating. Seeing the grave of human remains is one thing, but standing out in the photos is this fragment of pottery (likely a jug or a pitcher), where you can see the throwing rings of the person who crafted it, along with marks where they smoothed out the handle it was after attached.

I feel pretty desensitized to skeletal remains (especially apropos in the month of October, Halloween and all), but for some reason seeing that vessel with its clear characteristics of being wrought with hands like mine, really brings home the humanity of this situation. It has me imagining hundreds of possible stories explaining what happened here and how these people might have lived.

I'm with you.

In the Israel Museum, there are ceramic pots from ~ 5K - 7K years ago with the makers' fingerprints easily visible. I couldn't help wondering who they were, how they lived their lives, etc.

For me the fact that this guy's head was buried in the grave of a 5 year old child (that is not chance - someone did that deliberately) says a lot about humanity.

Someone took his head and put it with what I am assuming is his kid. Daddy and his child together at the end.

As I sit here watching my 2 year old play, I find this story quite touching in that regard.

Eastern Rome (wrongly called Byzantine, something most people then wouldn't even have known what Byzantium is) went on and was fully the Rome Empire. It never actually fell. All the learning and information was continued for the most part.

Sadly even they had a lot of problems in the 'dark age' (not a good name either). First their was the Justinian Plague and then they had a lot of civil war and conflict over Iconoclasm.

In general because of how Europe developed, and how the Renaissance happened in terms of intellectual history a lot of this history is only remember by very few people.

By 1000AD the Roman Empire was still going strong, being the most powerful state in along the Mediterranean.

Edit:

Check 'The History of Byzantium' Podcast, a follow on from the 'History of Rome' Podcast but by a different person.

Thersites the Historian has lot of good content on yt, for example https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEQru6POYgetKOdzDYaLy...

It never actually fell. I've heard that the continuity of the Byzantine Empire was assured by the Cantacuzino branch [1] that emigrated north to what we call today Romania and they played a role in the creation of the country along freemasonry. Actually, Romania is an invention of the freemasonry and one of the Cantacuzinos descendants was an official member, Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino.[2] Sounds like an Assasins's Creed saga but it is true.

Exctract from Wikipedia: "In advance of the Wallachian Revolution of 1848, a Freemason-inspired secret society known as Frăţia ("The Brotherhood") was set up. Ion Ghica, Nicolae Bălcescu, Christian Tell, Dimitrie Bolintineanu, Cezar Bolliac, Constantin Daniel Rosenthal, C. A. Rosetti, Dimitrie and Ion Brătianu, Alexandru G. Golescu and others belonged to Frăţia and were at the forefront of the revolution."

The elite of what was soon-to-become-Romania consisted entirely of people following Masonic principles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantacuzino_family

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry_in_Romania

Looks similar to the jaw break Stefan Struve (MMA fighter) got from Mark Hunt.

https://static.ffx.io/images/$width_1024%2C$height_576/t_cro...

That's amazing. Gold is a non-bio-reactive metal, and apparently they figured that out too.

Agreed - very sophisticated treatment.

There are a quite a few assumptions in the article regarding this being gold thread, you can of course pile on even more assumptions assuming those first ones are true but it becomes quite a house of cards like that.

They would have observed that gold doesn't rust, for example, and it was known for its enduring purity.

They knew that wearing silver or copper rings corrode, and gold didn't.

I love how the computer geek community here is so vigorously second-guessing the domain experts on this. (It's fun to do that, I guess.)

It's rather tedious. I find it impressive they could fix the jaw. Who cares what material they used.

I highly recommend John Romer's Byzantium: The Lost Empire. It's available on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MkhUix6PNI

This was probably done without any kind of pain killing anything, besides (just guessing) alcohol. It must have been absolutely excruciating for weeks, before the jaw healed. Unbelievable.

Googling "Byzantine era anesthetics" brings up a whole long list of research papers and articles.

Apparently (from the summary of one of the articles) opium has been used as a pain killer for a very long time, and the Byzantines used laudanum.

https://rhm.sums.ac.ir/article_45640.html

Maybe they knocked the guy out with laudanum before the procedure, which would have made the whole thing much easier and far less unpleasant for the patient.

2017 paper: https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/bz/article/do...

New paper: http://maajournal.com/Issues/2021/Vol21-2/16_Agelarakis_21(2...

The site kept scrolling up / refocusing to the video playing above as I was trying to read the article. Never mind then...

How would gold simply disappear from the jaw? Surely there would be some traces of it left?

Was there a source of arenic laden water flowing over it perhaps? Doubtful otherwise the bones would probably be gone too.

People who enjoy this will like https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/

"He was the military leader, most probably of the fort," Agelarakis said. "Therefore, he was decapitated ... by the Ottomans when they took over the fort."

They just... make this up.

Maybe he was decapitated by his own family then...

From the title, I thought this was a new consensus algorithm...

The headline makes it seem like they found the gold thread together with the jaw but none of this happened. its just supposition. Another case of bad science reporting based on pure assumptions.

In every generation, you have talented people doing things no one else can do. Knowledge and skill are routinely lost and rediscovered.

I wish we would stop framing such articles like "Le gasp! These primitive, uneducated people actually had impressive medical techniques!" We routinely act like everything we do is the most special and smartest thing ever and I've seen far too many articles and TV shows drawing this exact same conclusion that "Holy cow! They knew how to do things we would have never guessed!" (And sometimes we can't figure out how in heck they did it.)

I think the assumption that it was gold wiring is questionable. That should be framed more like "One possible explanation is gold for thus and such reasons." It shouldn't be framed like "We are such smarty pants and they are so amazingly stupid that this one explanation is the only real possibility."

That general trend is amazingly annoying given how common this type of "revelation" about historic peoples is.

> I wish we would stop framing such articles like "Le gasp! These primitive, uneducated people actually had impressive medical techniques!"

nothing in the article suggests this, and nobody who knows who the byzantines were think they were primitive uneducated people; in fact, the piece makes reference to medical techniques that were passed down in writing for centuries. the entire tone of this comment is seriously bizarre

The fact that it emphasizes that they had knowledge passed down for centuries is part of the problem. You never see articles about current surgeries framed that way though it's equally true. No one needs to say "Modern surgeons use knowledge gained over centuries -- millennia even! -- to do their job!"

We all know that, so it literally goes without saying. Needing to document that this culture had hundreds of years of such teachings to draw upon implicitly signals that we generally do think they are primitive, uneducated, etc regardless of your opinion about what people knowledgeable about the culture likely think of them.

The title asserts it was gold threaded. Why assert that? Combination of click bait and we think we are so smart that there couldn't be another explanation.

We just flat out refuse to say "We don't really know and it's possible they had medical techniques we have absolutely no knowledge of that could potentially improve modern day surgical techniques if we learned them."

No, the article describes the ancient surgeon(s) who conducted this operation as "sophisticated". Instead of framing him as some folk medicine-man blindly following some ancient principle. To me it's pointing more to the Byzantines being people of knowledge. Certainly, I wouldn't consider the people of a culture drawing upon history to implicitly signal them as primitive, in fact I consider it mark of a progressive and learned society!

It could be cited in a manner that more clearly signals "There are limits to what we know about them, but our limited knowledge includes this historic stuff."

You know, if you listen to people on the internet from various cultural backgrounds, they routinely roll their eyes at how mainstream media presents them. I'm making the same sort of observation here: That it aggravates me the way we implicitly signal our assumed superiority to older/other cultures.

That aggravation is not based on a single article. It's based on noticing patterns typically seen in such articles.

It aggravates me in part because I think it harms our scientific understanding. I think you need context to properly understand things and we generally do a poor job of recognizing that we lack that context.

This is the 14th century Byzantine Empire we're talking about here. They kept records in languages we can read, as did their neighbors and eventual conquerors. There's nothing about this discovery that is inconsistent with our prior knowledge of their medical technology, and no reason whatsoever to speculate that they were using some kind of secret lost medicine.

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