AFP

A skeleton discovered in a remote corner of Borneo rewrites the history of ancient medicine and proves amputation surgery was successfully carried out about 31,000 years ago, scientists said Wednesday.

Previously, the earliest known amputation involved a 7,000-year-old skeleton found in France, and experts believed such operations only emerged in settled agricultural societies.

The finding also suggests that Stone Age hunter-gatherers living in what is now Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province had sophisticated medical knowledge of anatomy and wound treatment.

“It rewrites our understanding of the development of this medical knowledge,” said Tim Maloney, a research fellow at Australia’s Griffith University, who led the work. 

The skeleton was uncovered in 2020 in the imposing Liang Tebo cave known for its wall paintings dating back 40,000 years.

Surrounded by bats, terns and swiftlets, and interrupted by the occasional scorpion, scientists painstakingly removed sediment to reveal an astoundingly well-preserved skeleton.

It was missing just one notable feature: its left ankle and foot.

The base of the remaining leg bone had a surprising shape, with knobbly regrowth over an apparently clean break, strongly indicating that the ankle and foot were removed deliberately.

“It’s very neat and oblique, you can actually see the surface and shape of the incision through the bone,” Maloney told a press briefing.

Other explanations, like an animal attack, crushing injury, or fall, would have created bone fractures and healing different from those seen in the skeleton’s leg.

A tooth and surrounding sediment showed the skeleton is at least 31,000 years old and belongs to a person who died at around 20 years old.

Despite the incredible trauma of amputation, they appear to have survived six to nine years after the operation, based on the regrowth on the leg bone, and suffered no major post-operative infection.

That suggests “detailed knowledge of limb anatomy and muscular and vascular systems,” the research team wrote in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“Intensive post-operative nursing and care would have been vital… the wound would have regularly been cleaned, dressed and disinfected.”

– ‘A hotspot of human evolution’ –

Humans have been operating on each other for centuries, pulling teeth and drilling skull holes in a process called trepanation.

But amputation is so complex that in the West it only became an operation people could reasonably hope to survive about a century ago.

The oldest previous example was a 7,000-year-old skeleton with a forearm found in France in 2010.

It appeared to confirm that humans only developed sophisticated surgery after settling in agricultural societies, freed from the daily grind of hunting food.

But the Borneo find demonstrates hunter-gatherers could also navigate the challenges of surgery, and did so at least 24,000 years earlier than once thought.

For all that the skeleton reveals, many questions remain: how was the amputation carried out and why? What was used for pain or to prevent infection? Was this operation rare or a more common practice?

The team speculates that a surgeon might have used a lithic blade, whittled from stone, and the community could have accessed rainforest plants with medicinal properties. 

The study “provides us with a view of the implementation of care and treatment in the distant past,” wrote Charlotte Ann Roberts, an archeologist at Durham University, who was not involved in the research.

It “challenges the perception that provision of care was not a consideration in prehistoric times,” she wrote in a review in Nature.

Further excavation is expected next year at Liang Tebo, with the hope of learning more about the people who lived there.

“This is really a hotspot of human evolution and archeology,” said Renaud Joannes-Boyau, an associate professor at Southern Cross University who helped date the skeleton.

“It’s certainly getting warmer and warmer, and the conditions are really aligned to have more amazing discoveries in the future.”

A ferocious heat wave scorching the western United States could finally begin to wane in the coming days, forecasters said Wednesday, but they warned of dangerous fire conditions as howling winds sweep through the bone-dry region.

California and neighboring states have endured a week of triple digit temperatures that have already brought deadly wildfires and the daily threat of power blackouts as the electricity grid struggles to cope with soaring demand.

But a predicted cooling as a cold front barrels in from Canada looks set to bring its own dangers, the National Weather Service said.

“This cold front will also aid in producing gusty winds throughout the northern Great Basin and northern High Plains today. Combined with low relative humidity, conditions are likely to support the potential for new wildfires to start and existing fires to spread uncontrollably,” the NWS warned.

The Storm Prediction Center “has issued an Extremely Critical fire weather area over north-central Montana, where winds could gust up to 60 miles (95 kilometers) per hour.”

A number of wildfires are already burning all over the western United States, including two deadly blazes that erupted over the long Labor Day weekend.

The Mill Fire in northern California killed two people, and destroyed over 100 buildings as it tore through 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of Siskiyou County.

To the southeast of Los Angeles, the Fairview Fire was continuing to grow and remained out of control, fire officials said Wednesday.

Two people are known to have perished as they tried to flee the blaze, which exploded from a standing start during soaring temperatures on Monday. It has now consumed 7,000 acres.

Local fire chief Josh Janssen said efforts to dowse the inferno would expand after a difficult day that saw flames “outpace our efforts.”

The blaze continues to spread with “all sides of the fire still threatening several communities.”

More than 10,000 people have been told to evacuate, but the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said not everyone had heeded the warnings — despite the deployment of dozens of deputies going door-to-door.

“You would think more people would take it seriously because it’s so fast-moving, and that’s why we try and do such a large evacuation area because the shift in winds, the weather is unpredictable, and fire moves fast,” department spokeswoman Brandi Swan told the Los Angeles Times.

– Weather whiplash –

More than two decades of drought has left the US West tinder dry and vulnerable to fast-moving fires that burn hotter and are more destructive.

Scientists say human-caused global warming is interfering with the natural weather cycle, amping up the hots and making the storms wetter and more unpredictable.

The kind of weather whiplash climatologists say is becoming more frequent could be on display later in the week, with forecasters predicting the heat wave in the southwest could give way to torrential rain.

While Wednesday and Thursday were expected to continue to be very hot, with the mercury topping 110 Fahrenheit (43 Celsius) in several places, a hurricane looming off the Pacific coast of Mexico looked set to bring up to six inches (15 centimeters) of rain to some parts of Arizona and California.

“This amount of rainfall is likely to produce scattered instances of flash flooding, particularly near recent burn scars,” the NWS said.

The soaring temperatures have put enormous pressure on California’s creaking power grid, with record demand for electricity to cool homes.

Rolling blackouts were narrowly avoided on Tuesday after the California Independent System Operator, which runs the grid, issued an emergency call to cell phone users for households to turn up their air conditioner thermostats and switch off unnecessary lights.

California ISO called again Wednesday for economising.

“The emergency alert has been declared to help the grid secure more supplies and urge market participants to lower demand on the system. The state and much of the West is enduring an historically long and record-breaking heat wave, straining the grid from high electricity use,” the body said.

California has abundant solar installations, including on homes, which typically provide for around a third of the state’s power requirements during daylight.

But when the sun goes down, that supply falls quickly, leaving traditional generation to plug the gap. The problem is particularly acute in the early evening when temperatures are still high, but solar starts dropping out of the power mix.

A ferocious heat wave scorching the western United States could finally begin to wane in the coming days, forecasters said Wednesday, but they warned of dangerous fire conditions as howling winds sweep through the bone-dry region.

California and neighboring states have endured a week of triple digit temperatures that have already brought deadly wildfires and the daily threat of power blackouts as the electricity grid struggles to cope with soaring demand.

But a predicted cooling as a cold front barrels in from Canada looks set to bring its own dangers, the National Weather Service said.

“This cold front will also aid in producing gusty winds throughout the northern Great Basin and northern High Plains today. Combined with low relative humidity, conditions are likely to support the potential for new wildfires to start and existing fires to spread uncontrollably,” the NWS warned.

The Storm Prediction Center “has issued an Extremely Critical fire weather area over north-central Montana, where winds could gust up to 60 miles (95 kilometers) per hour.”

A number of wildfires are already burning all over the western United States, including two deadly blazes that erupted over the long Labor Day weekend.

The Mill Fire in northern California killed two people, and destroyed over 100 buildings as it tore through 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of Siskiyou County.

To the southeast of Los Angeles, the Fairview Fire was continuing to grow, and remained out of control, fire officials said Wednesday.

Two people are known to have perished in the blaze, which exploded from a standing start during soaring temperatures on Monday, and has now consumed 5,000 acres.

More than 10,000 people have been told to evacuate, but the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said not everyone had heeded the warnings — despite the deployment of dozens of deputies going door-to-door.

“You would think more people would take it seriously because it’s so fast-moving, and that’s why we try and do such a large evacuation area because the shift in winds, the weather is unpredictable, and fire moves fast,” department spokeswoman Brandi Swan told the Los Angeles Times.

– Weather whiplash –

More than two decades of drought has left the US West tinder dry and vulnerable to fast-moving fires that burn hotter and are more destructive.

Scientists say human-caused global warming is interfering with the natural weather cycle, amping up the hots and making the storms wetter and more unpredictable.

The kind of weather whiplash climatologists say is becoming more frequent could be on display later in the week, with forecasters predicting the heat wave in the southwest could give way to torrential rain.

While Wednesday and Thursday were expected to continue to be very hot, with the mercury topping 110 Fahrenheit (43 Celsius) in several places, a hurricane looming off the Pacific coast of Mexico looked set to bring up to six inches (15 centimeters) of rain to some parts of Arizona and California.

“This amount of rainfall is likely to produce scattered instances of flash flooding, particularly near recent burn scars,” the NWS said.

The soaring temperatures have put enormous pressure on California’s creaking power grid, with record demand for electricity to cool homes.

Rolling blackouts were narrowly avoided on Tuesday after the California Independent System Operator, which runs the grid, issued an emergency call for households to turn up their air conditioner thermostats and switch off unnecessary lights.

“Consumer conservation played a big part in protecting electric grid reliability,” the body tweeted. “Thank you, California!”

California has abundant solar installations, including on homes, which typically provide for around a third of the state’s power requirements during daylight.

But when the sun goes down, that supply falls quickly, leaving traditional generation to plug the gap. The problem is particularly acute in the early evening when temperatures are still high, but solar starts dropping out of the power mix.