SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Fnord666
[...] After all, who needs a hole in the head? Yet for thousands of years, trepanation -- the act of scraping, cutting, or drilling an opening into the cranium -- was practiced around the world, primarily to treat head trauma, but possibly to quell headaches, seizures and mental illnesses, or even to expel perceived demons.
[...] "In Incan times, the mortality rate was between 17 and 25 percent, and during the Civil War, it was between 46 and 56 percent. That's a big difference. The question is how did the ancient Peruvian surgeons have outcomes that far surpassed those of surgeons during the American Civil War?"
[...] Whatever their methods, ancient Peruvians had plenty of practice. More than 800 prehistoric skulls with evidence of trepanation -- at least one but as many as seven telltale holes -- have been found in the coastal regions and the Andean highlands of Peru, the earliest dating back to about 400 B.C. That's more than the combined total number of prehistoric trepanned skulls found in the rest of the world.
Source: Remarkable skill of ancient Peru's cranial surgeons
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @02:35PM (1 child)
They probably look for signs of healing of the skull. If there is significant healing, the patient probably survived the trepanation, if not, the patient died shortly after the trepanation (not sure whether they can infer that cause of death was the procedure itself).
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday June 11 2018, @02:52PM
Well, thinking on this, even if 50% of those found with fresh skull ventilation died from an unrelated cause such as being sacrificed in a religious ritual or from an ASW/PDT (arrow shot wound/poison dart targeting), that would mean that the mortality rate from the cranial breezeway fitting procedures was only half what it appears (~8 to 13 percent).
I don't, however, think that it's such a bad inference upon finding a body with nice sharp entrance wounds to the head to conclude a high likelihood that they were involved in some way with the demise of the departed.