The surgeon was dressed in a goat or sheep skin and used a sharpened stone to amputate the arm of his patient. The operating theatre was not exactly Harley Street - more probably a wooden shelter - but the intervention was a success, and it has shed light on the medical talents of our Stone Age ancestors. Scientists unearthed evidence of the surgery during work on an Early Neolithic tomb discovered at Buthiers-Boulancourt, about 65km south of Paris. Read more
Instances of trepanation have been documented on many occasions amongst Linearbandkeramik (LBK) and post-LBK burials in Europe. Other surgical interventions, such as amputations, have, however, been recorded more rarely and remain difficult to identify. It appears that such a case can be documented at a site excavated in 2005 in advance of sand quarrying at Buthiers-Boulancourt, 70 km south of Paris (Samzun et al. 2006) (Figure 1). This Neolithic site was occupied by agro-pastoralists of the LBK culture: seven longhouses were dated, by the pottery found in their borrow pits, to the later Blicquy-Villeneuve-Saint-Germain period or 4900-4700 BC (Durand et al. 2008), which corresponds to the late and post-LBK period in Central Europe. Read more