In The News: Department of Anthropology
The case remains, who was found in a barrel at Lake Mead?
A changing climate is revealing decades-old items once submerged in lakes or buried in glaciers, including human remains. For forensic anthropologists, who are tasked with retrieving them, a warming world may mean more discoveries unveiled by receding water and ice. It also means recovering victims of climate change.
A few years ago, my husband and I had a bit of a situation on our hands. Our 4-year-old daughter had figured out how to climb onto the roof of our home. After breakfast in the mornings, we would find her perched, like a pigeon, three stories above a busy city sidewalk. (It makes me a bit nauseous to think about it).
Representing current and emerging methods and theory, this volume introduces new avenues for exploring how prehistoric and historic communities provided health care for their sick, injured, and disabled members. It adjusts and expands the bioarchaeology of care framework—a way of analyzing caregiving in the past designed for individual case studies of human skeletal remains—to detect and examine care at the population level.
Sometimes you actually do need another hole in your head.
Damage around the man’s oval skull opening indicates that someone scraped out that piece of bone, probably to reduce brain swelling caused by a violent attack or a serious fall, said bioarchaeologist Diana Simpson of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Either scenario could explain fractures and other injuries above the man’s left eye and to his left arm, leg and collarbone.
The remains of a man buried in what’s now Alabama reveals that the continent’s oldest skull surgery occurred at least 3,000 years ago.
The oldest skull surgery in North America dates back a staggering 3,000 years, new research has found.
The oldest skull surgery in North America dates back a staggering 3,000 years, new research has found.
Analysis of a prehistoric man's skull found a hole in his forehead, according to bioarchaeologist Diana Simpson from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Even by modern standards, performing skull surgery on a living person is considered a complicated procedure, which is why it might be surprising to learn that the oldest known case of skull surgery in human history occurred 13,000 years ago in Northern Africa. To give you some perspective, that's more than twice as old as the pyramids built by ancient Egyptians over 4,500 years ago. The Egyptians themselves were known to have performed skull surgery around 4,000 years ago.
Bone regrowth suggests a man survived having a hole scraped out of his forehead