‘Trephination’ (also known as ‘trepanation’) is an ancient medical practice that involves cutting a hole in the patient’s head. Ancient civilizations across the globe, from South America to Africa and beyond, performed the surgery. Now, thanks to recent excavations at the ancient city of Megiddo, Israel, there’s new evidence that one particular type of trephination dates back to at least the late Bronze Age.
Rachel Kalisher, a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University, led an analysis of the excavated remains of two upper-class brothers who lived in Megiddo around the 15th century B.C. She found that not long before one of the brothers died, he had undergone a specific type of cranial surgery now called angular notched trephination. The procedure involves cutting the scalp, using an instrument with a sharp beveled edge to carve four intersecting lines in the skull, and using leverage to make a square-shaped hole. Kalisher said the trephination is the earliest example of its kind found in the Ancient Near East. Her analysis, written in collaboration with scholars in New York, Austria and Israel, was published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Whatever may be said of the technical prowess of Peru’s ancient Inca civilization, it is now clear that they achieved a mastery of brain surgery, unequaled even by the time of the American Civil War four centuries later. That was the conclusion of a study published in the journal Science. In fact, say the scientists, they were able to analyze evidence of ‘trephination’ from many ancient societies. The survival rate for the procedure could be determined from any healing observed in the subject skulls. If there was no healing, then it was clear the patient had not survived the operation. Commonly, said the study, the procedure was intended to relieve pressure from swelling following a head injury, but it may also have been intended for headaches or other conditions that were not evident in the skulls examined.
Dr. David Kushner of the University of Miami, and a team of experts looked at 59 skulls from Peru’s central highlands over a period of several centuries and determined that survival rates eventually reached over 90%, whereas, in almost half of head wounds treated with trepanation during the Civil War, the patient died. Once again, the advancement of ancient science has surprised modern science, but, ironically, the Incan culture, itself, also represents a decline from levels achieved much earlier by their own predecessors, now virtually unknown to us, except though their architecture. In Sacsayhuaman and many other Peruvian sites, the great refinements of a much older and more advanced culture, contrast sharply with the cruder practices of the more recent Inca.
Clearly, they were only inheritors of the older ruins, not their creators.
AR #131
Was Inca Science Ahead of its Time, or Not
