Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
About 31,000 years ago, a skilled prehistoric surgeon cut off the lower leg of a child hunter-gatherer in Borneo. Now, archaeologists have concluded that this ancient surgery is the earliest medical amputation on record.
The skill of the Stone Age surgeon was admirable; the patient went on to live an additional six to nine years after the surgery, a radiocarbon dating performed by researchers of the individual’s tooth enamel revealed, according to a study published online Wednesday (Sept. 7) in the journal Nature.
“It was a huge surprise that this ancient forager survived a very serious and life-threatening childhood operation, that the wound healed to form a stump and that they then lived for years in mountainous terrain with altered mobility,” study co-author Melandri Vlok, a bioarchaeologist and postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney,“ said in a statement. ”[This suggests] a high degree of community care.“ Read more.
1) “a high degree of community care” haha yes another to add to the list of “proof we’ve always supported each other and not been vicious heartless ‘everyone fend for themselves’ bastards”
2) I think it’s just that I don’t see it OFTEN but the description of “a skilled prehistoric surgeon” just filled me with love and joy. I don’t see nearly enough acknowledgement of the skill and intelligence of prehistoric peoples and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to see it. :D
Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato
For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!
I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.
There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼
It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:
And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:
These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.
also the people of Chicxulub Puerto are fully aware of this, and even created a memorial for all of dinosaurkind on their own dime!
and personally, I think this single heartfelt block of concrete is more fitting than any number of sleek expensive monoliths in the world’s best museums.
at an unremarkable time in this unremarkable place, the world ended, once. it’s good to remember that.
my internal monologue when Ancient Egypt is mentioned: [don’t talk about imhotep and the first codified diagnostic manual. the fact you know so much about it is deeply weird and nobody cares about medicine that much]
That sounds fascinating and I want to know. Please.
The year is 1862, and antiquities dealer (and forger) and self-made Egyptologist Edwin Smith steals a papyrus from an antiquities seller in Luxor. I could go on a whole separate rant about European colonialists treating culturally significant artifacts like grab ‘n go bags and have done so here.
Anyway, Edwin’s pilfered scroll gets translated in 1930, and it turns out have been a transcript from about the 17th century BCE of a papyrus written by a man named Imhotep, a vizier in the court of King Djozer who practiced neurosurgery, and made forays into astronomy and architecture too.
Now, Imhotep was wicked smart. As in “when the Greeks met him they incorporated him into the pantheon as a magician of Ascelpius because they couldn’t figure out how he had such a comprehensive understanding of the human body and treating it’s ills” smart. His scroll was a record of treatment of 48 cases, ranging from fractures of the hand to open abscessed wounds to trauma injuries to the skull. Side note: a lot of medicine during this period was considered to be the work of occult phenomena, and so a lot of treatments involved charms to ward off malignant spirits and incantations to aid in curing them.
What’s remarkable about the Edwin scroll is that it is the first recorded account of medicine without the attachment of spiritual or occult phenomena as the root cause or a means of treatment; it’s a purely scientific endeavour, complete with an anatomical glossary, diagnosis, summary, method of treatment and prognosis for each injury and illness.
It’s the first evidence-based, scientific diagnostic manual.
The most significant case is Case 45, concerning a patient with “bulging masses — they may be compared to the unripe hemat fruit which is cool, and hard to the touch” in the breast. These masses are malignant tumours, the manifestation of breast cancer, and provide us with the first ever recorded case of cancer.
Imhotep knew that a tumour that has hot to the touch was a sign of infection (the inflammatory immune response produces tumor (swelling), rubor (redness), dolor (pain), and significantly to this calor, or heat). Infected abscesses could be treated with draining and a topical poultice. In the section for therapy for Case 45, though, there’s one single, haunting line:
“There is none.”
In 2500BCE, well before germ theory, aseptic technique, chemotherapy and antibiotics, a surgeon picked up a scroll of fresh papyrus and provided us with the first ever codified, scientific diagnostic manual for injury and illness, and the first written record of the emperor of all maladies that we call cancer.
That’s pretty fucking dope.
(If the cancer aspect is something you’re interested in, I highly recommend The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It’s a record of the diagnosis and treatment of cancer from the days of Imhotep to the present day, and it’s a fascinating read)
