The Woman of Pritschoena died around 4,500 years ago in what's now Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Her skeleton was discovered in 1913 by a local archaeologist. Thanks to being buried in a gravel pit, her remains are exceptionally well preserved.
The Woman's skull is a fine example of trephination - the practice of deliberately cutting holes in the skull. She was trephined not once but twice, as you can see in the images above taken from a paper just out. In both cases, the skull around the hole shows clear evidence of healing, which shows that the Woman must have survived the procedures.
Trephination is a historical mystery. Stone-age peoples around the world were fond of doing it - trephinations have been found on skulls from Europe, the Americas and Asia. The authors of this paper say that there are records of at least 800 trephined skulls.
In some parts of Europe, it seems that the survival rate for the operation was over 90%. It was a delicate procedure, with stone tools used to carefully scrape away and remove the bone without damaging the tissue underneath. But no-one knows why they did it. Some argue that it may have been used as a treatment for epilepsy or mental illness, but it's impossible to really know what it was meant to achieve.
Alfieri, A., Strauss, C., Meller, H., Stoll-Tucker, B., Tacik, P., and Brandt, S. (2012). The Woman of Pritschoena: An Example of the German Neolithic Neurosurgery in Saxony-Anhalt Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 21 (2), 139-146 DOI: 10.1080/0964704X.2011.575117
12 comments:
Isn't it common to open the skull if the brain is "swollen"? They may have had a headache for a long time and figured that drilling a whole might solve it.
Bizarrely, some people are still keen on drilling holes in their own heads:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Feilding#Trepanation
Matt Wall: o_O that is the most bizarre thing I've seen for a while. I mean plenty of people have weird ideas about the brain, but that's the first time I've seen it extend to the skull...
Grubblaren,
Nice thinking since they probably ignored what is the "flesh" under the skull useful for.
For our culture, it tooks Descartes (and its wrong theory of the pineal gland containing "his rational soul")
and the great Thomas Willis (and friends) from Oxford to let go the premature Aristotle dogma according to which the heart was the center of the mind and courage.
Thanks Neuroskeptic for an interesting post as usual and thanks also Matt Wall.
Omg, I just read though several alt med pages about trepanation, and am seriously shocked. One said 'trepanation is not legal in the us or europe so if you want this done you would need your friends help you or pay a doctor under the table' Yikes! This is the most dangerous alternative treatment I have ever heard of. www.alternativehealth.co.uk/trepanation/index.html
Who knows. But she sure had great teeth!
Re Matt's comment about Amanda Fielding - you can find her video on youtube http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=/watch%3Fv%thmst rtomen3DD9q0KD7eBjU
Interestingly, she is a co-author on the recent David Nutt fMRI paper on psilocybin
Philip Pullman made resolution of that particular mystery one of the major plot points in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy.
Towards the same end, there was a hypothesis current in Victorian England that the nature of human consciousness was more dreamlike in the Bronze Age than it is today and that this was somehow related.
Neither, of course, have any scientific validity, and the cross-cultural nature of the practice is suggestive that it flows from some sort of universal perception of the problem (e.g. migranes) rather than flowing from some elaborate culture specific system (such as the ones that have given rise to foot binding and neck elongation).
Migraines seem like a good bet actually, because they feel like they're "in your head".
By contrast, epilepsy is not obviously a problem located in the head.
We know it is but to a stone age observer it would probably look like a problem of the limbs, or the muscles, maybe even the skeleton taking on a life of its own. Why would you blame the head, when the body is what's convulsing?
I need a trephination like I need a hole in my head.
Pretty effective data, thanks so much for your article.
Anyone (like me) with terrible and longstanding frontal sinus issues even after 5 surgeries could tell you that piercing your own skull starts to be a tempting alternative when the pain goes on, and on, and on...and on.....
Post a Comment