A 31.000 Years Old Amputated Skeleton in Borneo Couldn’t Have Happened

VIVA – A team of Australian orthopedic surgeons and infectious disease specialists have debunked a scientific breakthrough that was lauded as rewriting our understanding of human history.

In 2020, archaeologists discovered a 31000 years old skeleton missing its lower left leg in an Indonesian cave. An expedition team led by Australian and Indonesian archaeologists stumbled upon the skeletal remains while excavating a limestone cave in Borneo looking for ancient rock art in 2020.

The archaeologists argued it was the earliest known evidence of surgery, according to a peer-reviewed study.

The finding they said was evidence of the earliest known surgical amputation, predating other discoveries of complex medical procedures across Eurasia by tens of thousands of years.

Dr. Tim Maloney, a research fellow at Australia’s Griffith University, at the time said the nature of the healing, including the clean stump, showed it was caused by amputation and not an accident or animal attack.

But this month a team of Newcastle doctors and clinicians have refuted the claims in the journal Nature as lacking any understanding of orthopedic practices.

Professor Zsolt Balogh, a trauma surgeon at John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle that he was “very skeptical” about the publication’s findings, “The main conclusion of surgical amputation 31,000 years ago is impossible to happen. There are much more plausible causes.” He said.

Prof. Balogh said the most obvious cause of an open fracture is that the person injured the limb and cut through soft tissue rather than bone. The amputation in the cave does not fit the picture, he said.

He also stated that the authors missed the much more important and noteworthy point of the findings, that people with missing limbs actually survived in these prehistoric communities for many years.

"31,000 years ago, prehistoric humans could care for each other, to care for someone who had lost a limb," he informed.

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VIVA.co.id

22 Juli 2025