Gruesome Skull Discovery Contains The Earliest Evidence of Ear Surgery

There are signs of a brutal ear surgery found in an ancient skull uncovered at a monument in Spain.

Archaeologists think the patient probably had a double-sided acute middle ear infection.

Without treatment, fluid can gather behind the eardrum, which can cause a lump in the skull, hearing loss, or even life threatening inflammation of the brain.

Prior to the mid-19th century ear surgery was only done to save lives. Solid evidence is hard to come by, even though some interpretations of ancient writings hint at surgical interventions as far back as the first centuryCE.

Similar procedures could have been carried out thousands of years ago.

The skull was found at a burial site called the Dolmen of El Pend, which was used in the fourth millennium BCE as a resting place for bones. The caretakers of the memorial separated the heads, limbs, and pelvises of dozens of corpses in a bid to break individuality.

The skull was found at the El Pend site. The Scientific Reports were written by Navarro et al.

They did their jobs a little too well. Because the skull was found on its own, it can't tell us much about the owner. It is hard to say how old she was because there are no limbs associated with her.

Researchers think she was between 35 and 50 years old because of her lack of teeth and fusion of her skull bones.

There is evidence that she underwent an early type of ear surgery.

Her ear infections must have been bad because without anesthesia, prehistoric ear surgery would have been unbearably painful.

To drill through the skull behind the ear, the woman would have needed to be restrained or given a substance that would make her less conscious of her reality.

The surgery appears to have worked. The bones near both of her ears show signs of decline, but they also show no signs of infections at the time of her death. There was clear bone regeneration and remodeling, which is a common part of the healing process.

She still has knife marks on her left side, even though both of her ears would have needed surgery.

There are bones around the ear. The Scientific Reports were written by Navarro et al.

The marks on the right side are missing, which suggests that the wounds were already healed when the woman died. She probably had ear surgery twice in her life.

Based on the differences in bone remodeling between the two temporals, it appears that the procedure was first conducted on the right ear, which was the location where the prehistoric woman survived.

It is not possible to determine whether the interventions were performed back-to-back or several months, or even years had passed. It is the earliest documented evidence of a surgery on the temporal bones, and is most likely the first known radical mastoidectomy in the history of humankind.

Scientific Reports published the study.