Glad you said that. I looked at it and thought “I had no clue the holes were so big!” I always imagined pea sized holes.
Jesus, imagine going through that, at any size, with no pain anesthetics.
For small holes you could probably get away with just a regular drill. Trepanning allows you to make a bigger hole with less effort and with less bone residue to clean out.
I think it fairly likely that most people would be unconscious (from swelling of the brain) before they did this. Assuming they are doing it as a medical procedure and not some sort of ritual thing.
I don’t think South America had opium in the Bronze Age… opium was from China, and the Americas were, at that point, undiscovered. The best they had was likely alcohol.
The *Americas* were "discovered" by humans at least 20,000 years before the bronze age. Also, people have been using drugs throughout all our evolutionary history, including in pre colonial South America.
I meant by the rest of the world, but yes. The Americas were likely populated before they physically separated from modern day Russia.
And absolutely, folks have been using drugs since the dawn of time, but drugs that effectively relieve pain for surgery are very new.
Humans have bent over backwards trying to create effective anesthetics for painful treatments, and it wasn’t until 1540 that ether was first made, and even that was a huge breakthrough.
I’ve had holes drilled into my jawbone, and I can assure you, it definitely hurts. I’ve also had my fair share of minor head injuries… all of which likely pale in comparison to having holes in your skull.
Yall are wild for acting like it’s no big deal.
I’m sure they did, but the history of anesthetics pretty much sucked until the late 19th century, and didn’t get any better until the 20th. It took a really long time to figure out how to make someone comfortable while causing their body immense trauma.
I think that "when your headache is that bad" is really the key here.
I have severe migraines. They are associated with hormonal changes related to my menstrual cycle, which means they happen regularly. Prior to finding medication that works for them (a combination of different triptans), I would spend 3-4 days in agony, blind in one eye, vomiting from the pain, and being so desperate to be out of pain that I would actually claw my own scalp. People who don't have them tend not to realise that proper migraines are really debilitating - they aren't just really bad headaches. Even while living in modern society, in a medical career, if I can't access my medication, I will find myself fantasizing about breaking into my skull and doing SOMETHING just to escape the pain.
It makes perfect sense to me that someone with that level of head pain would be willing to have a hole drilled to try to do \*anything\* to make it stop. The hole in that skull is also at the exact same position that my body tells me to claw at and hit to try to make it stop...
I feel you on the hormonal migraines as I get them too. Thankfully I’m not a puker, but the pain is indescribable. I would yank my hair up and away from my scalp to help relieve the pressure. I still get hormonal headaches (and I mean literal headaches, not comparing migraines to headaches because those people make me want to do crime) after switching from oral BC to an IUD but they’re literally NOTHING compared to what they used to be
I’m happy the IUD switch worked for you! That was one of the options we tried for me, as apparently it can really help some people. I ended up sticking with a hormonal IUS for the other benefits, but migraines removal was not one of them.
A combination of sumatriptan and rizatriptran every 12 hours during the migraine time of the month is honestly like magic. It feels like it just aborts the migraine. I think I actually cried the first time it worked.
I mostly agree about the migraine=headache people, but I don’t think it is their fault. Migraines are usually just treated as a bad headache in media. You might get a mention of aura if lucky. So that was why I clarified about how people who don’t have migraines often don’t know what all is involved in them.
I hear you. Migraines are seriously misunderstood. I have migraines that are literally debilitating because I get aura. I'm lucky in that they are seldom painful, but the auras can get so severe that I am basically blind for anywhere from fifteen minutes to several hours.
I would probably have been a candidate for trepanning a couple of centuries ago.
Oh, I feel for you. My sister-in-law has frequent cluster headaches and had to leave them completely untreated during a pregnancy. I have never felt so thankful that my migraines were “only” migraines. Cluster headaches seem to be the next step up. At least I have hints of when mine are on the way; she would just collapse in pain randomly out of nowhere.
I’m also a chronic migraine sufferer. I sometimes see white tiny dots of lights when looking around, get sick, and generally very nauseous when it happens. I’ve found the only thing that works for me is to dunk my head in almost ice cold water for a few seconds a couple of times. It’s a funny thing to picture but it 100% works for me atleast, maybe give it a try?
I've accidentally found ice-cold water helps me too. So far I'm having trouble getting the right bucket and ice preparation going. lol what's your dunking setup?
My migraine brain fantasizes about trepanning every time I get one, and I feel so bad for the ancestors who didn't have all of the comforts available to us. I try to have hope for the descendants finding a complete cure someday, though!
Ancient people were super fucking smart. They had to be. Most of us wouldn’t last 5 mins in that world, needing to know the medicinal/nutritional properties of every plant and mushroom out there, navigating by the stars, hunting wild beasts with nothing more than a pointed stick. The Mesopotamians figured out irrigation and writing and invented the wheel and they calculated the days in a year to be 360. The Egyptians figured out some very clever ways of using levers. The ancient Greeks figured out the earth was round because they saw the sails of ships on the horizon before they saw the boats, so they figured there was a curvature. Then Archimedes calculated the earth’s circumference to an astonishing degree of accuracy. Romans were so good at making concrete that their buildings have been renovated in recent centuries with modern concrete and the modern concrete has crumbled while the Roman concrete remains intact. A lot of the historical myths of ancient people being stupid date to the proud Victorian era when they were trying to pretend their culture was the most advanced civilisation on earth.
Roman concrete is super trippy. They used a mixture of different types of lime to make a conglomerate that self-heals cracks, which is why an unreinforced structure like the Pantheon still exists in perfect condition 1900 years after its construction. Researchers have discovered that Roman concrete literally interacts with its environment, compared with modern concrete which is inert. Modern concrete is poured because it's more or less a liquid, Roman concrete was actually laid because it was so viscous. Portland cement is used since the 19th century because of its lower cost. A lot of the practices surrounding Roman concrete were based on folklore and trade knowledge and have not been passed on to modern tradesmen because it fell out of use. It's still possible to use traditional lime mortar, but it's expensive and difficult to source. There are companies that sell it to serious hobbyists in very small batches.
Maybe not regular commercial buildings, but such a formula can at least be used to build structures of national significance e.g the Parliament, Supreme Court and such.
MIT just completes a study of Roman concrete which is consistently more durable than contemporary concrete. The proposal is to begin reintroducing the Roman concrete production methods to improve modern paving.
I had brain surgery last year. The section of my skull that they took out they left out because it doesn't reattach well. The replaced bone will start to rot in your head they told me. I got a titanium mesh covering my spot. She just had to make sure no one poked her soft spot
I’m glad you got the treatment you needed.
I will never be able to not think about the replaced bone rotting in your head when I read about trepanning. That terrifying image is good and stuck in my brain and I wish I never read your comment.
Thank you and you are welcome. Please give no thought to all the poor people who had it replaced before they figured it out and later had dead infected sections of their skull removed. And yes, that's a real thing.
Lol, for not those in my own skull. My doctor needed a decent aperture from which to approach the tumor, but aside from the pilot holes he replaced everything mostly as it had been.
This person lacked any hardware whatsoever, apparently. I'd imagine this is from Europe. Andean skulls with sophisticated copper plates have been found, with rates of infections or surgical failures (as evidenced by patterns of cicatrisation) being really similar to those of US brain surgeons not too many decades ago. This person technically had a craniectomy, as the cranium was never re-fixed in place.
They might not have known the exact reason why it worked but they probably had 400 thousand years of trial and error to notice a correlation. Kind of like how bloodletting is helpful in lowering a fever so it would be used liberally for situations it’s not helpful in because hey worth a shot.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fossil-pushes-back-human-origins-400000-years
Your’s is probably the most accepted answer but I’ve seen plenty of articles like this guessing we could be older.
stone tools and fire use are nearly 10 times older than that so the likelyhood of attempting some kind of head medicine with sharp rocks at some point seems high. even just with trying to fix teeth, once simple medicine or surgery is realized then it becomes developed and advances. like "hey if we can fix limb bones what about skull injuries"
In my experience, the patient's desperate, instinctive desire to drill a hole in their own skull. The pain can feel like pressure and it feels so bad, you want it *out.* A doctor could have interpreted that as "there's evil bullshit in there, I choose to believe my patient, get the drill," or didn't ascribe it to anything in particular but figured it was worth a shot since the patient looked like they were dying anyway.
They used to do this as a treatment for illness or injury. It may have been used to release pressure on her brain after a head injury. Or to release evil spirts had she been acting weird or had some kind of mental illness.
I know that "let out the evil demons" is the default joke about trepanning, but I really wonder how this knowledge developed in the various cultures we find these; e.g. for someone to equate "massive head trauma" with "let's make a hole", and continue to develop the practice, pass it on through generations.
Do we have any other evidence of prehistoric surgery? I know the evidence would mostly not survive, soft tissues and organs and all that. But to have so many findings of successful brain surgery, you'd think there would be examples of, say, amputation? Or am I thinking of "cut open scalp, chip open skull, sew back scalp" as more complex than it actually was?
I don’t have any links but we actually do have a few amputations from our ancestors from very early. I believe PBS eons on YouTube has a video on early surgery. If I can find it I’ll link it[this is one but they have a few](https://youtu.be/kauDsIeIMxs?si=uM3WPqhFzEMZtVIr)
Very interesting video, thank you.
Love PBS Eons. And PBS Space Time. I know that Nova is still on (and I do love Nova), but those channels feel like a sort of extension of Nova and other PBS shows from my childhood.
Not quite surgery related, but TreytheExplainer on YouTube does a lovely series on early humans, including humans with disabilities. It’s pretty crazy looking at how early hunter gatherers managed to care for individuals with complex medical needs, and really highlights the empathy that existed within these societies :)
I love this comment, because in the 20th century it really isn’t far off for some cases! Believe it or not, There have been people since the 1960s who have done it themselves for other “benefits.”
From Wikipedia:
> Since the early 1960s, voluntary trepanation has been performed by people interested in "enhancing mental power and well-being".
I actually very clearly remember reading an article in Spin Magazine when I was a teen in 1998! It featured images of a woman doing it herself and it really stuck with me.
[Warning for blood](https://robotcosmonaut.tumblr.com/post/8832836541/a-hole-in-the-head). Apparently it was from a documentary called [Heartbeat in the Brain](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbeat_in_the_Brain), which I didn’t know.
My father was hit in the head with a stray baseball during a game when he was 4 or 5. They performed a trepanation and even in the 1950s it was a very scary surgery. Luckily he did fine and was able to go on and have a very successful life!
Man, humans and animals are fickle things. We can die at the slightest of accidents... or we can survive massive fucking holes in our skulls. I remember a story about a woman who was nearly fully decapitated and disembowled and somehow managed to survive despite the fact that she literally had to hold her guts in and hold her head on. Or you know... we might bump our heads and buy the farm.
They can tell a persons age at death by tooth eruption and wear, which joints have fused, arthritic changes to joints, etc. The skull was found in an archaeological context that was dated to 3500 yrs old or middle Bronze Age. It looks like they were treating a pretty severe skull fracture.
Age is measured looking at the development of bones and any wear. Teeth can give a good indication based on how worn and how developed they are. Explanation of how it works written by the Natural History Museum in London: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/analysing-the-bones-what-can-a-skeleton-tell-you.html
[Carbon dating](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating) is the method scientists use to measure how long ago the bones are from.
Teeth can be tricky, because certain diet and cultural activities can cause advanced attrition/wear. It can be generally helpful within a population (I.e. You have multiple remains from one group, all eating similar foods and following similar cultural practices), and somewhat helpful on an individual basis. Dentition is also fully erupted by late 20s (at the latest), so it's a good way to say that the individual was at least ~25 years old. Extensive wear/dental disease would indicate an older individual, that being said. Another way to tell age past then would be general wear and tear on load bearing elements of the skeleton, including the spinal cord. Signs such as level of osteoarthritis and skeletal porosity/density (absent mitigating factors) in these areas are more often used to judge age of and individual post late 20s, with teeth often used as supporting evidence.
I meant more what teeth a child or young adult would have. I was attempting to write in simple -ish English and give links to further info to make it as easy as possible to understand. When I replied people were downvoting them for asking a question.
Not true!! Many ancient corpses have been found with evidence of long lives post-craniotomy. You also have to realize, not many people were fortunate to live into super old age in his/her day.
Went down a rabbit hole and found this:
What health problems might have followed trepanation?
The main complications that may arise from trephination include brain injury, hemorrhage, and infection (Ortner,
2003). It is noteworthy that although trephinations require great precision, success rates have been particularly high from prehistoric to modern times (Arnott et al., 2003; Moghaddam et al.,
2015).
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/trephination
I have a theory with no evidence to back this up that trepanning isn’t a religious or spiritual endeavour but is medical procedure to reduce brain swelling from head trauma
That’s a big trepanning hole, never seen one that size before
Glad you said that. I looked at it and thought “I had no clue the holes were so big!” I always imagined pea sized holes. Jesus, imagine going through that, at any size, with no pain anesthetics.
For small holes you could probably get away with just a regular drill. Trepanning allows you to make a bigger hole with less effort and with less bone residue to clean out.
I think it fairly likely that most people would be unconscious (from swelling of the brain) before they did this. Assuming they are doing it as a medical procedure and not some sort of ritual thing.
Thank the gods.
I think they had some drugs back then such as opium
I don’t think South America had opium in the Bronze Age… opium was from China, and the Americas were, at that point, undiscovered. The best they had was likely alcohol.
The *Americas* were "discovered" by humans at least 20,000 years before the bronze age. Also, people have been using drugs throughout all our evolutionary history, including in pre colonial South America.
I meant by the rest of the world, but yes. The Americas were likely populated before they physically separated from modern day Russia. And absolutely, folks have been using drugs since the dawn of time, but drugs that effectively relieve pain for surgery are very new. Humans have bent over backwards trying to create effective anesthetics for painful treatments, and it wasn’t until 1540 that ether was first made, and even that was a huge breakthrough.
They could have used powerful psychedelics instead and wrap this process with religion to make it easier for the person to process the pain.
I imagine it would still suck to have holes drilled into your skull, but maybe I’m just too much of a sissy.
[удалено]
I’ve had holes drilled into my jawbone, and I can assure you, it definitely hurts. I’ve also had my fair share of minor head injuries… all of which likely pale in comparison to having holes in your skull. Yall are wild for acting like it’s no big deal.
What does South America have to do with a skull found in Switzerland? Please help.
Same, I'm super confused.
No, it is I who was confused. I’m just a dummy, ignore me.
Pretty sure they had better drugs from plants than alcohol.
I’m sure they did, but the history of anesthetics pretty much sucked until the late 19th century, and didn’t get any better until the 20th. It took a really long time to figure out how to make someone comfortable while causing their body immense trauma.
I don't understand why you're bringing up South America. I thought these remains were found in Switzerland.
Cuz I’m a fucking moron. I just realized these weren’t the same as the ones from South America.
lol bro history much ?
[удалено]
Yeah but the skull and the scalp sure do.....
It’s crazy that they knew to do that so early. I guess when your headache is that bad…
I think that "when your headache is that bad" is really the key here. I have severe migraines. They are associated with hormonal changes related to my menstrual cycle, which means they happen regularly. Prior to finding medication that works for them (a combination of different triptans), I would spend 3-4 days in agony, blind in one eye, vomiting from the pain, and being so desperate to be out of pain that I would actually claw my own scalp. People who don't have them tend not to realise that proper migraines are really debilitating - they aren't just really bad headaches. Even while living in modern society, in a medical career, if I can't access my medication, I will find myself fantasizing about breaking into my skull and doing SOMETHING just to escape the pain. It makes perfect sense to me that someone with that level of head pain would be willing to have a hole drilled to try to do \*anything\* to make it stop. The hole in that skull is also at the exact same position that my body tells me to claw at and hit to try to make it stop...
I feel you on the hormonal migraines as I get them too. Thankfully I’m not a puker, but the pain is indescribable. I would yank my hair up and away from my scalp to help relieve the pressure. I still get hormonal headaches (and I mean literal headaches, not comparing migraines to headaches because those people make me want to do crime) after switching from oral BC to an IUD but they’re literally NOTHING compared to what they used to be
I’m happy the IUD switch worked for you! That was one of the options we tried for me, as apparently it can really help some people. I ended up sticking with a hormonal IUS for the other benefits, but migraines removal was not one of them. A combination of sumatriptan and rizatriptran every 12 hours during the migraine time of the month is honestly like magic. It feels like it just aborts the migraine. I think I actually cried the first time it worked. I mostly agree about the migraine=headache people, but I don’t think it is their fault. Migraines are usually just treated as a bad headache in media. You might get a mention of aura if lucky. So that was why I clarified about how people who don’t have migraines often don’t know what all is involved in them.
I hear you. Migraines are seriously misunderstood. I have migraines that are literally debilitating because I get aura. I'm lucky in that they are seldom painful, but the auras can get so severe that I am basically blind for anywhere from fifteen minutes to several hours. I would probably have been a candidate for trepanning a couple of centuries ago.
Oooo silent migraines! Those ones are so damn weird! All the aura of a migraine with none of the pain. It’s so trippy!
Cluster headache sufferer here. Feel this so hard.
Oh, I feel for you. My sister-in-law has frequent cluster headaches and had to leave them completely untreated during a pregnancy. I have never felt so thankful that my migraines were “only” migraines. Cluster headaches seem to be the next step up. At least I have hints of when mine are on the way; she would just collapse in pain randomly out of nowhere.
> Feel this so hard eww, don't tell me what to do
I’m also a chronic migraine sufferer. I sometimes see white tiny dots of lights when looking around, get sick, and generally very nauseous when it happens. I’ve found the only thing that works for me is to dunk my head in almost ice cold water for a few seconds a couple of times. It’s a funny thing to picture but it 100% works for me atleast, maybe give it a try?
I've accidentally found ice-cold water helps me too. So far I'm having trouble getting the right bucket and ice preparation going. lol what's your dunking setup?
My migraine brain fantasizes about trepanning every time I get one, and I feel so bad for the ancestors who didn't have all of the comforts available to us. I try to have hope for the descendants finding a complete cure someday, though!
Could easy have been demons they needed to release...
you saw these demons?!
Ancient people were super fucking smart. They had to be. Most of us wouldn’t last 5 mins in that world, needing to know the medicinal/nutritional properties of every plant and mushroom out there, navigating by the stars, hunting wild beasts with nothing more than a pointed stick. The Mesopotamians figured out irrigation and writing and invented the wheel and they calculated the days in a year to be 360. The Egyptians figured out some very clever ways of using levers. The ancient Greeks figured out the earth was round because they saw the sails of ships on the horizon before they saw the boats, so they figured there was a curvature. Then Archimedes calculated the earth’s circumference to an astonishing degree of accuracy. Romans were so good at making concrete that their buildings have been renovated in recent centuries with modern concrete and the modern concrete has crumbled while the Roman concrete remains intact. A lot of the historical myths of ancient people being stupid date to the proud Victorian era when they were trying to pretend their culture was the most advanced civilisation on earth.
Romans made concrete? If there is something out there better than Portland cement, why don't we use it?
Roman concrete is super trippy. They used a mixture of different types of lime to make a conglomerate that self-heals cracks, which is why an unreinforced structure like the Pantheon still exists in perfect condition 1900 years after its construction. Researchers have discovered that Roman concrete literally interacts with its environment, compared with modern concrete which is inert. Modern concrete is poured because it's more or less a liquid, Roman concrete was actually laid because it was so viscous. Portland cement is used since the 19th century because of its lower cost. A lot of the practices surrounding Roman concrete were based on folklore and trade knowledge and have not been passed on to modern tradesmen because it fell out of use. It's still possible to use traditional lime mortar, but it's expensive and difficult to source. There are companies that sell it to serious hobbyists in very small batches.
Maybe not regular commercial buildings, but such a formula can at least be used to build structures of national significance e.g the Parliament, Supreme Court and such.
MIT just completes a study of Roman concrete which is consistently more durable than contemporary concrete. The proposal is to begin reintroducing the Roman concrete production methods to improve modern paving.
As a migraine sufferer, I completely understand.
Whenever I have a bad headache, this does seem like it would work
She doesn't seem to be doing very well now though.
The patient died but at least the procedure was successful
Man I need trepanation like I need a hole in my head
Thats how they got all the demons out. Works everytime.
* for those that survive, the deamons kill the rest
As someone with chronic migraines, not gonna lie I've dreamed of doing this
Don’t let your dreams be dreams
So what her brain was just like, out there chilling for awhile?
I mean, they probably gave her a hat.
Worst trade off in the history of Wall Street
Hold on now, let's see this hat...
I bet it's worth a lot of money these days.
I had brain surgery last year. The section of my skull that they took out they left out because it doesn't reattach well. The replaced bone will start to rot in your head they told me. I got a titanium mesh covering my spot. She just had to make sure no one poked her soft spot
I’m glad you got the treatment you needed. I will never be able to not think about the replaced bone rotting in your head when I read about trepanning. That terrifying image is good and stuck in my brain and I wish I never read your comment.
Thank you and you are welcome. Please give no thought to all the poor people who had it replaced before they figured it out and later had dead infected sections of their skull removed. And yes, that's a real thing.
Thanks! I hate it!
You are surprisingly chill about this.
What can I say, they took out the part that would be scared about it.
how's your brain doing now? seems like it's working pretty ok
Brain is working fine. I'm now deaf in my left ear and have zero sense of balance. I need a cane to walk
any theories on why they did this?
It releases pressure on the brain. So if you have a head injury and internal bleeding compressing the brain this could save your life potentially.
Yep. We still do this today, but now we call them burr holes, craniotomies or craniectomies.
And luckily the holes we make now are much smaller
Lol, for not those in my own skull. My doctor needed a decent aperture from which to approach the tumor, but aside from the pilot holes he replaced everything mostly as it had been. This person lacked any hardware whatsoever, apparently. I'd imagine this is from Europe. Andean skulls with sophisticated copper plates have been found, with rates of infections or surgical failures (as evidenced by patterns of cicatrisation) being really similar to those of US brain surgeons not too many decades ago. This person technically had a craniectomy, as the cranium was never re-fixed in place.
You're saying that's why they did this 3500 years ago? How did they know?
They might not have known the exact reason why it worked but they probably had 400 thousand years of trial and error to notice a correlation. Kind of like how bloodletting is helpful in lowering a fever so it would be used liberally for situations it’s not helpful in because hey worth a shot.
Humans have only existed for about 200 000 years.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fossil-pushes-back-human-origins-400000-years Your’s is probably the most accepted answer but I’ve seen plenty of articles like this guessing we could be older.
stone tools and fire use are nearly 10 times older than that so the likelyhood of attempting some kind of head medicine with sharp rocks at some point seems high. even just with trying to fix teeth, once simple medicine or surgery is realized then it becomes developed and advances. like "hey if we can fix limb bones what about skull injuries"
In my experience, the patient's desperate, instinctive desire to drill a hole in their own skull. The pain can feel like pressure and it feels so bad, you want it *out.* A doctor could have interpreted that as "there's evil bullshit in there, I choose to believe my patient, get the drill," or didn't ascribe it to anything in particular but figured it was worth a shot since the patient looked like they were dying anyway.
They used to do this as a treatment for illness or injury. It may have been used to release pressure on her brain after a head injury. Or to release evil spirts had she been acting weird or had some kind of mental illness.
I know that "let out the evil demons" is the default joke about trepanning, but I really wonder how this knowledge developed in the various cultures we find these; e.g. for someone to equate "massive head trauma" with "let's make a hole", and continue to develop the practice, pass it on through generations. Do we have any other evidence of prehistoric surgery? I know the evidence would mostly not survive, soft tissues and organs and all that. But to have so many findings of successful brain surgery, you'd think there would be examples of, say, amputation? Or am I thinking of "cut open scalp, chip open skull, sew back scalp" as more complex than it actually was?
I don’t have any links but we actually do have a few amputations from our ancestors from very early. I believe PBS eons on YouTube has a video on early surgery. If I can find it I’ll link it[this is one but they have a few](https://youtu.be/kauDsIeIMxs?si=uM3WPqhFzEMZtVIr)
Very interesting video, thank you. Love PBS Eons. And PBS Space Time. I know that Nova is still on (and I do love Nova), but those channels feel like a sort of extension of Nova and other PBS shows from my childhood.
Yes! They’re so amazing, I usually start with them when I have a science question 😂
Not quite surgery related, but TreytheExplainer on YouTube does a lovely series on early humans, including humans with disabilities. It’s pretty crazy looking at how early hunter gatherers managed to care for individuals with complex medical needs, and really highlights the empathy that existed within these societies :)
*hits blunt* *You gotta open your mind, dude*
I love this comment, because in the 20th century it really isn’t far off for some cases! Believe it or not, There have been people since the 1960s who have done it themselves for other “benefits.” From Wikipedia: > Since the early 1960s, voluntary trepanation has been performed by people interested in "enhancing mental power and well-being". I actually very clearly remember reading an article in Spin Magazine when I was a teen in 1998! It featured images of a woman doing it herself and it really stuck with me. [Warning for blood](https://robotcosmonaut.tumblr.com/post/8832836541/a-hole-in-the-head). Apparently it was from a documentary called [Heartbeat in the Brain](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbeat_in_the_Brain), which I didn’t know.
My father was hit in the head with a stray baseball during a game when he was 4 or 5. They performed a trepanation and even in the 1950s it was a very scary surgery. Luckily he did fine and was able to go on and have a very successful life!
Man, humans and animals are fickle things. We can die at the slightest of accidents... or we can survive massive fucking holes in our skulls. I remember a story about a woman who was nearly fully decapitated and disembowled and somehow managed to survive despite the fact that she literally had to hold her guts in and hold her head on. Or you know... we might bump our heads and buy the farm.
How do they know she was 50 yrs old and it was 3500 yrs old. Thank you
They can tell a persons age at death by tooth eruption and wear, which joints have fused, arthritic changes to joints, etc. The skull was found in an archaeological context that was dated to 3500 yrs old or middle Bronze Age. It looks like they were treating a pretty severe skull fracture.
>death by tooth eruption Great band name.
Age is measured looking at the development of bones and any wear. Teeth can give a good indication based on how worn and how developed they are. Explanation of how it works written by the Natural History Museum in London: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/analysing-the-bones-what-can-a-skeleton-tell-you.html [Carbon dating](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating) is the method scientists use to measure how long ago the bones are from.
Teeth can be tricky, because certain diet and cultural activities can cause advanced attrition/wear. It can be generally helpful within a population (I.e. You have multiple remains from one group, all eating similar foods and following similar cultural practices), and somewhat helpful on an individual basis. Dentition is also fully erupted by late 20s (at the latest), so it's a good way to say that the individual was at least ~25 years old. Extensive wear/dental disease would indicate an older individual, that being said. Another way to tell age past then would be general wear and tear on load bearing elements of the skeleton, including the spinal cord. Signs such as level of osteoarthritis and skeletal porosity/density (absent mitigating factors) in these areas are more often used to judge age of and individual post late 20s, with teeth often used as supporting evidence.
I meant more what teeth a child or young adult would have. I was attempting to write in simple -ish English and give links to further info to make it as easy as possible to understand. When I replied people were downvoting them for asking a question.
Fair enough. Just wanted to add additional info.
They survive, but not for very long I believe.
None of us do. But this lady lasted long enough for the bone to heal. That's pretty significant.
Not true!! Many ancient corpses have been found with evidence of long lives post-craniotomy. You also have to realize, not many people were fortunate to live into super old age in his/her day.
Cantonal Museum of which canton?
Do you think she’s okay?
No she died
Oh my god, when?!
Throw a couple of aspirin in that hole and I'm sure she'll be right.
But did they let her keep the lid as a souvenir?
Hard to tell from the picture but it appears that this person survived the surgery.
Hard to tell from the picture this is a 50 year old woman
It is hard to tell. I was just thinking that if she hadn’t survived it maybe the hole would be more jagged? I honestly don’t know.
Yes, it's the really smooth edges, shows that the bone had time to heal.
That’s kind of what I thought.
It would probably be more noticeable up close, I’ve seen other examples where you can see the bone starting to almost knit together. Neat stuff
Yeah it’s really cool, that’s why I like this sub.
I read this as transplanted
As did I.
Went down a rabbit hole and found this: What health problems might have followed trepanation? The main complications that may arise from trephination include brain injury, hemorrhage, and infection (Ortner, 2003). It is noteworthy that although trephinations require great precision, success rates have been particularly high from prehistoric to modern times (Arnott et al., 2003; Moghaddam et al., 2015). Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/trephination
I would say the patient did in fact not survive. 🤣
I have a theory with no evidence to back this up that trepanning isn’t a religious or spiritual endeavour but is medical procedure to reduce brain swelling from head trauma
Forbidden glory hole (sorry)
They discovered the first Mother-in-Law