Stone Age surgeons opened skulls, and many of their patients lived
Trepanning, cutting a hole in the skull, may be the oldest surgery with archaeological proof, reaching back 7,000 to 10,000 years. Healed bone around many openings shows patients survived. At one French burial site from 6500 BCE, a third of the skulls bear the marks.
The word traces back through Latin to a Greek term for a borer or auger. Practitioners, often priests or healers, worked with hand tools of stone, obsidian, bronze or bone. Archaeologists recognise the operation from the shape of the opening, the cut edges and signs of healing, and must rule out look-alikes such as wounds from weapons. More than 1,500 trepanned skulls from the Neolithic have turned up across Europe, Siberia, China and the Americas, making up perhaps 5 to 10 percent of all skulls from that era. Most belonged to adult men, though women and children appear too.
Motives varied. Some communities probably meant to release spirits blamed for strange behaviour, and removed discs of bone may have been kept as charms. Others were practical emergency treatment after head injuries from falls, hunting accidents or clubs, to lift out fragments and ease pressure. Researchers link it to conditions including epilepsy and hydrocephalus, while the idea that it cured headaches may be myth. One puzzling find is a cow from France, around 3400 to 3000 BCE, that may represent the earliest known veterinary operation or experiment.
Skill improved with time. Early survival in France may have been only around 40 percent, while some Iron Age European groups reached 78 percent. In the Andes, where the practice was especially common, surgeons learned to avoid the skull's midline and its large blood vessel, and survival there eventually rose to about 80 percent. The Maya used a different method, grinding the bone thin rather than drilling. In China, a woman buried in Xinjiang around 1615 BCE had clearly healed after hers.
Hippocrates and Galen wrote about the procedure, and it continued through the Middle Ages. East African healers practised it too, and it was filmed among the Kisii of Kenya in 1958. Modern medicine keeps the trephine for corneal transplants.
Source: Trepanning
