5,300-Year-Old Skull Offers Earliest Known Evidence of Ear Surgery

Bone growth suggests the patient survived the procedure, which was likely conducted to treat an infection

Jane Recker

February 24, 2022

Some 5,300 years ago, humans in what is now northern Spain cut into an elderly woman’s skull, likely in an effort to relieve her ear pain. Now, reports Judith Sudilovsky for the Jerusalem Post, archaeologists say the woman’s skull represents the earliest known evidence of ear surgery.

Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the study centers on a skull discovered in 2018 among the remains of around 100 people in a large, single-chamber tomb called the Dolmen of El Pendón. The tomb—made up of two upright stones supporting a flat, horizontal stone—is located in Reinoso, a town in the Spanish province of Burgos, and remained in use between roughly 3800 and 3000 B.C.E., notes Vishwam Sankaran for the Independent.

The woman’s skull shows evidence of two separate procedures. As the study notes, the first was conducted on the right ear, perhaps to treat an infection or problem “sufficiently alarming to require an intervention.” The second, which could have taken place “back-to-back or several months, or even years” later, targeted the left ear. Bone growth around the perforations indicate the woman survived both surgeries by at least a month, reports the Agencia de Noticias para la Difusión de la Ciencia y la Tecnología (DiCYT).

According to the Independent, the placement of the cuts suggests the patient had a mastoidectomy—surgery undertaken to treat an infection of the mastoid bones, which are located just behind each ear. (These bones help regulate ear pressure and protect the delicate structures of the ear.) If left untreated, the infection could have spread to the air pockets of the mastoid bones, filling them with infected material and creating potentially life-threatening conditions like meningitis or blood clots.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/5300-year-old-skull-offers-earliest-known-evidence-of-ear-surgery-180979636/