The 31,000-year-old skeleton of a young adult was found in a cave in Indonesia.
The prehistoric surgery could show that humans were making medical advances much earlier than previously thought, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The remaining leg bone showed a clean, slanted cut that healed over, Maloney said. There were no signs of infection, which would be expected if the child had gotten its leg bitten off by a creature like a crocodile. And there were also no signs of a crushing fracture, which would have been expected if the leg had snapped off in an accident.
Also, the community would have had to care for the child for years afterward, since surviving the rugged terrain as an amputee wouldn’t have been easy.
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