Borneo skeleton may show 31,000 year old amputation | Hacker News Reader

Borneo skeleton may show 31,000 year old amputation

aljazeera.com

36 pointsmooreds21 comments

> The remaining leg bone showed a clean, slanted cut that healed over

I'm very curious about what sort of tool they might have used for this. Perhaps they sawed through the bone with the serrated edge of a knapped stone blade?

What rules out an accidental amputation that healed? Hell of an injury to survive though, and medical knowledge would have been required to save the individual from that.

"The remaining leg bone showed a clean, slanted cut that healed over"

How did you accidentally get a clean cut through bone?

Chopping wood or similar, maybe? I think it’d be a miracle they didn’t bleed out but I’m not a doctor. The next sentence in the article suggests it couldn’t have been an accident but the reasoning seems odd.

Cauterizing wounds with fire as a way of stopping bleeding out and infection has been known for a long time. Alternatively, when slave boys were castrated/emasculated to become eunuchs, they would be buried up their necks in sand until the wound healed. Apparently the death rate was still massive though.

Do you have any reading material about this? I'm genuinely curious what burying surgical wounds in sand would do to help encourage healing...

Or maybe it didn't?

What kind of tools did they use to chip wood back then?

Hand axes, probably formed using with biface knapping but possibly with ground edges. But either way, hafted axes aren't known to have existed that far back, so a leg-severing axe accident seems implausible to me.

They probably knew to bind off the limb.

Cutting wood with a tool sharp enough 30k years ago to hack off a limb in one fell swoop is... unlikely lol

They contacted and worked with a handful of doctors/surgeons specializing in amputations, which examined the bones and explained how an amputation that resulted in the damage observed could have happened, and could not have happened - and they all independetly agreed that this had to be deliberate.

At least that's the short summary I remember from one of the scientist on the bbc science podcast.

If deliberately done, why was the other leg showing signs of having had the bone cut?

It’s a confusing situation. Thanks for the additional information.

Curious, indeed. I guess it depends on what they mean by clean here. I would think serrations would leave traces (very small, jagged edges) on the bone, but if it did I’d also think they’d mention it. It’s very odd. I guess the alternative is that they chopped it clean off. That’s pretty gnarly to think about.

Those traces might not be distinguishable after seven years of bone remodeling.

>Previously, the earliest known amputation involved a 7,000-year-old skeleton found in France, and experts believed such operations only emerged in settled agricultural societies.

Thats quite the jump

At the time, all of what we think of as the sea between Borneo, Sumatra, and Java, and on up to Thailand and Taiwan, and the whole South China and Yellow Seas up to Korea was all dry land, like a million square miles of it.

Borneo was high ground. Most of what was going on with humanity at the time, according to cave painting evidence, was there and is now almost all under water.

There is a hill on Java built over 20,000 years ago. Excavation was halted, by the Indonesian government, for reasons not expressed.

FYI, you were shadowbanned four days ago, probably automatically for your multiple flagged-to-death comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33208156. Maybe you should try to appeal to the mods.

Doesn't surprise me at all that the nuclear fan-community here is playing dirty.

Most of his comments in that thread are not flagged, nor even grayed. Most which are grayed or flagged are ones like this:

In response to "How exactly will you be 100% renewable during a cloudy and windless period with solar and wind?" he commented "Trolling is unwelcome here, thank you." Seems like a justified flagging to me; with no supporting argument that comment amounts to nothing more than a bare insult.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33209047

Not a justified flagging. It is trolling. People who make that argument about unreliability are at best dishonest. To make that argument either means you know next to nothing about renewable energies other than that wind and sun aren't consistent. Or you are purposefully lying.

It is a form of gaslighting. These kind of arguments have been discussed to death but "renewable energy isn't consistent" is either to understand than it is to refute. It takes pages of text to fully explain this and only a few words to repeat the allegation. Sprinkle in a few claims about nuclear power being the only alternative to global warning (with even less proof) and you can shout down anyone who disagrees.

They weren't shadow banned: they were explicitly banned:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33211562

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