Hippocrates had written an entire treatise on the treatment of head wounds. Fewer than half the people made it.Īcross the ocean, in the Europe, skull surgery had advanced to the use of metal probes and drills. If there were fractures and broken pieces of bone, they could carefully remove those,” Verano said.īased on skulls that show evidence of long-term bone healing, Verano said the oldest surgeries had about a 40% survival rate. “Someone examining a patient like that could clean out the wound and then take a look. The gaping hole in his head would have created a window to the brain.

The surgery was among the first of its kind performed in the Americas, about 2,400 years ago. One man had the entire upper left side of his skull scraped away with a stone blade.

“There are many cases where there is a hole in the skull, and right next to it is a fracture line that’s extending out,” he said. Tools solve Stone Age mystery: Cavemen were smarter than we thought “People were getting hit all the time.”Īfter examining more than 800 Peruvian skulls with holes in them, he’s concluded the violence made the region a natural laboratory for primitive surgeons to invent ways to treat a head injury. “It was a rough neighborhood,” Verano said. Sling stones and clubs fractured countless heads in ancient Peru. Sling stones, clubs and lots of skull bashing They would be a lot less mysterious if they just had the one, he explained. He examined 41 skulls with one hole and 21 with two or more. Verano had come to locate, photograph and study prehistoric skulls with surgical holes in them. “That was not my favorite museum, although the stuff in there was wonderful.” I thought I was going to die,” he jokingly recalled. “I thought I was going to be poisoned to death. Freezing and battling the stench of mothballs, he and a colleague dug skull after skull out of boxes. Verano got his first look at them in 2002, when he visited an unheated Cusco museum 11,000 feet high in the Andes. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Hulton Archive/Getty Imagesĥ,000-year-old brewery discovered in China The statuette was found at Saqqara, the necropolis of the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis. He pushes the bread through a basket and beer drips into a large pot with a spout below. Scholars couldn’t explain the strange openings, and many of the skulls were buried again, but this time, it was in mothballs inside gigantic storage boxes.Ī limestone statuette of an Egyptian servant pressing out the fermented barley-bread from which beer was brewed, circa 1930. Then, in 1936, an excavation at another Incan burial site turned up more mysterious skulls with multiple healed holes in them. The openings were perfectly circular and consistent in size. It contained five holes cut through layers and layers of healed bone. “I have to admit, we don’t know why they did it.”Ī hundred years ago, the same Yale expedition that first publicized Machu Picchu ventured into a Peruvian burial cave and discovered a rare Incan skull.

“They survived five or seven operations, so it’s pretty amazing,” Verano said. Here’s one mystery he’s yet to solve: Why were four or five or even seven holes sometimes surgically cut into the skulls of Incan men and women while they were still alive? As a forensic anthropologist, he’s examined skeletons and mummies throughout the Americas to unlock secrets about prehistoric human sacrifice, warfare, injury and disease. John Verano investigates ancient mysteries.

Obsidian scalpel made by patient