Cavemen carried out medical amputations over 30,000 years ago.
Cavemen carried out successful medical amputations
Remarkable new findings show that patients survived the prehistoric procedures even though they happened thousands of years before the discovery of antiseptics - which are required to fight off post-surgery infections that usually lead to death.
Experts discovered the skeleton of a Stone Age human male in a cave in Borneo who had his left foot surgically removed and lived for around another ten years.
The patient is thought to be aged 11 when his foot was cut off with the "clean sloping cut" ruling out the possibility of an accident.
Boffins are convinced that the find is the first example of a complex operation and "rewrites history of human medical knowledge".
Tim Maloney, of Australia's Griffith University, told the journal Nature that it shows "a really strong case the community had developed advanced medical understandings".