An interesting medical case has been buried under the floor of a Bronze Age building in Israel for 3,500 years. Now, a team of archaeologists has examined the remains of the two wealthy brothers buried here, revealing that both likely struggled with chronic infectious diseases in childhood. Both skeletons showed porosity, lesions, and signs of inflammation, suggesting a long-term disease such as tuberculosis or leprosy. Most interestingly, one of the skulls had been surgically cut open while the young man was still alive. This points to a primitive brain surgery.
Primitive brain surgery may be an attempt to cure the sick body, but it appears that the patient died during or shortly after surgery. The team’s research on the skeletons was published in the journal PLoS One.
Rachel Kalisher, a Brown University archaeologist and lead author of the study, said: “We have evidence that trephination (an ancient, extremely risky surgical procedure performed in any part of the skull by incision without damaging the cerebral cortex) has been a universal and common type of surgery for thousands of years. “But we don’t see this very often in the Near East – only a dozen examples of trephination have been discovered in this entire region.”
The brothers were buried in Megiddo, an ancient settlement located on the Via Maris road that connected important regions such as Egypt and Mesopotamia. Based on the quality of the items buried with the two men and the apparent medical care they received, the researchers speculate that the brothers may have been well-off or elite members of the Megiddo community.
Trefination was done to reduce pressure build-up in the skull. In this case, about one square centimeter of the skull was excised from one of the siblings (estimated to be about 1.80 meters tall and 21 to 46 years old when he died). While it did help with the pressure, it clearly didn’t help him much: According to the team’s analysis, the man died within days, if not during, operation.
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