![]() "We tend to think about disability or any kind of illness as something that would have gotten you shunned," says Kalisher. There were no signs that the men had been ostracized because of the chronic illness or disability they'd experienced. ![]() "And they're doing a very good job of putting it together with the actual historical context of the site in the Bronze Age." "This is just a really good example of collaborative work that's using as many lines of inquiry as possible," says Lans. Without access to a special diet or caregivers of some sort, Lans says, the brothers would likely have died before their disease progressed to the point of leaving lesions on their bones. "As messy as their bones looked, they lived long enough to have whatever was going on reflected in bones," notes Aja Lans, a bioarchaeologist at Harvard University who wasn't involved in the research. However it came about, the fact that the brothers lived with some kind of severe illness into early adulthood suggests they'd lived lives of at least some privilege. Or "maybe they were living together and one caught the infectious disease from the other." "Maybe they were predisposed to have the same illnesses," suggests Kalisher. Earlier DNA analysis revealed it was his younger brother. He was buried beside someone else whose bones also had lesions. Sadly, however, he didn't survive long after the procedure. Kalisher and her colleagues speculate in their research paper that the trephination was likely an intervention for the man's declining condition. "So that individual, from head to toe, had a lot going on." Even his foot bones were reshaped - "kind of squished," says Kalisher. His nose had been broken, and had healed in a lopsided way.īelow the skull, the bones of the man's skeleton were marked by lesions consistent with an infectious disease like tuberculosis or leprosy. His two forehead bones never fused properly. The man's skull had several other anomalies - including an extra molar, "which is really odd and rare," Kalisher says. The remains of the older brother are colored blue and those of the younger brother are colored green. Once excavated, their skeletons revealed numerous anomalies. Kalisher et al., 2023/PLOS ONE Some 3500 years ago, two brothers were buried alongside one another. Today, a similar procedure called a craniotomy is used to treat brain tumors, aneurysms and other problems. But this is the earliest example of this "angular notched" technique in the geographic region by at least several centuries. ![]() Worldwide, the practice of trephination of the skull dates back thousands of years to the Neolithic period. They were in the grave, alongside the body.Įarliest example of the surgical technique in this area "We actually even found two of the pieces of bone that had been wedged out," she says. Kalisher and the research team could tell the hole had been made in the man's skull while he was still alive and not too long before his death, from the color and slope of the cut, the fact that there had been no growth of the bone in the skull after that excision was made, and that care had been taken not to puncture a tissue layer protecting the brain.Īnd the way the hole was created, Kalisher says (with intersecting incisions cut into that patch of skull before removing the resulting bone shards), was rare. "It looked so fresh and so sharp and it was unlike anything I'd ever seen," she recalls. So, when she spotted this square hole in the skull about the size of a large postage stamp, she knew it was special. How scientists knew the hole had been made before death In addition to treating penetrating head trauma at the time, Kalisher says, it was used to try to manage seizures and other medical problems. Rachel Kalisher Bioarchaeologist and Brown University graduate student Rachel Kalisher working at the Megiddo excavation site in northern Israel.Ī skull trephination is a hole made by a surgical procedure during which a piece of the skull is removed to relieve pressure on the brain.
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