科学家日前在印度尼西亚婆罗洲发现了一例可追溯至3.1万年前的人类骨架，此人左脚曾做过截肢手术，而且在术后获得了康复。
格里菲斯大学的Tim Maloney和同事报道了婆罗洲发现的一名年轻个体的骨架遗骸。这位年轻个体左小腿的下1/3被手术截肢，截肢时此人可能还是儿童，而这一切至少发生在3.1万年前。
研究人员发现，此人在术后又生存了6至9年，最后被葬在加里曼丹东部Liang Tebo的石灰岩溶洞中。
研究人员指出，为此人做左小腿截肢手术的人必定对四肢结构、肌肉和血管非常了解，知道如何预防致命的失血和感染。
他们推测，此人的截肢不太像是由动物攻击或其他事故导致的，因为这类事件一般会导致粉碎性骨折。截肢也不太可能是一种惩罚手段，因为被截肢者似乎在术后得到了精心照料并被悉心安葬。
研究结果表明，亚洲的部分早期现代人觅食群体在晚更新世晚期热带雨林环境中掌握了先进的医学知识和技术。
研究人员认为，热带环境中极快的伤口感染速度可能推动了新型药物的出现，如抗菌剂，这些药物利用了婆罗洲生物多样性丰富的植物及其药用价值。
参考自《中国科学报》 2022-09-08 第2版
论文原文，附论文摘要：
The prevailing view regarding the evolution of medicine is that the emergence of settled agricultural societies around 10,000 years ago (the Neolithic Revolution) gave rise to a host of health problems that had previously been unknown among non-sedentary foraging populations, stimulating the first major innovations in prehistoric medical practices. Such changes included the development of more advanced surgical procedures, with the oldest known indication of an ‘operation’ formerly thought to have consisted of the skeletal remains of a European Neolithic farmer (found in Buthiers-Boulancourt, France) whose left forearm had been surgically removed and then partially healed. Dating to around 7,000 years ago, this accepted case of amputation would have required comprehensive knowledge of human anatomy and considerable technical skill, and has thus been viewed as the earliest evidence of a complex medical act. Here, however, we report the discovery of skeletal remains of a young individual from Borneo who had the distal third of their left lower leg surgically amputated, probably as a child, at least 31,000 years ago. The individual survived the procedure and lived for another 6–9 years, before their remains were intentionally buried in Liang Tebo cave, which is located in East Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, in a limestone karst area that contains some of the world’s earliest dated rock art. This unexpectedly early evidence of a successful limb amputation suggests that at least some modern human foraging groups in tropical Asia had developed sophisticated medical knowledge and skills long before the Neolithic farming transition.