Evidence of trepanation found in 7,000 year old skull from Sudan:

One of the oldest known cases of trepanation of the skull in North East Africa - about 7,000 years ago - discovered Poznań archaeologists working in Sudan. The research project leader Dr. Maciej Jórdeczka told PAP about the discovery.

The discovery was made during excavations in the Neolithic settlement (5th-4th millennium BC) in Omdurman in Sudan.

"The dead were then buried within the settlement - it was a widely practiced custom" - told PAP Dr. Maciej Jórdeczka from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology (IAE) PAS in Poznań.

Trepanation is a procedure consisting in making a hole in the skull for medical or magical-religious purposes. Scientists are not able to clearly determine why the procedure had been performed on the person, whose remains they found during excavation. The hole in the skull in this instance was circular, with a diameter of approx. 2 cm.

Surprise for the scientists was "advanced" age of the deceased: 55-65 years. The average age 7,000 years ago in Sudan it was in fact much lower. Hardly anyone lived to such "venerable" age - experts note.
Anthropologist from the National Archaeological Museum in Warsaw, Dr. Łukasz Maurycy Stanaszek determined that the wound resulting from trepanation had not healed, which means that the procedure could lead to instant death of the man. He does not rule out that the hole could be made after the death of the man for unspecified magical purposes, such as "releasing an evil spirit from the body". The scientist pointed out that the hole was made proficiently - the edge of the hole is quite regular and smooth, which undoubtedly proves the use of special scraping tools. He mentioned flint-bone scrapers, knives or drills.
Read more at archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com...

Well number of things to take away from this;
1) a man of that era, lived close to our modern life span for males between 55-65.
2) The surgeon sucked, the old cruder probably died on the operating table.
3) Anubis was on the menu.
And hats off to those Poles for carrying the load like no other in the Sudan, almost all the new discoveries there is due to them...

a reply to: Spider879

Humans have always lived to around that age. The thing that mess up the numbers of life expectancy of ancient people was the infant mortality rate.

originally posted by: defiythelie
a reply to: Spider879

Humans have always lived to around that age. The thing that mess up the numbers of life expectancy of ancient people was the infant mortality rate.

Really?? I was always told that by 30ts you are dead, but hey could be.

originally posted by: defiythelie
a reply to: Spider879

Humans have always lived to around that age. The thing that mess up the numbers of life expectancy of ancient people was the infant mortality rate.

Agreed. As someone who has done a lot of research into my family's genealogy, I have found a lot of my ancestors lived into and beyond this age range. However, I have also found several infant and child deaths. Same thing for genealogical research I have done into other surnames attached to my own by marriage.

originally posted by: Spider879

originally posted by: defiythelie
a reply to: Spider879

Humans have always lived to around that age. The thing that mess up the numbers of life expectancy of ancient people was the infant mortality rate.

Really?? I was always told that by 30ts you are dead, but hey could be.

Nope, consider ten people, five of whom live to 60 years old and five who die in childbirth, the average lifespan is 30 years...There are actually quite a few Kings recorded who reigned for more than fifty years in the Ancient world

a reply to: Marduk

Marduk....I know you to be one of the best posters on this site but on this, you're wrong.
Infant mortality is not a factor when people discuss ancient life spans...

Chronic malnutrition combined with a violent existence saw few ancients living into their fifties...
Royalty would be expected to far outlive the average person in antiquity as they were not prone to repetitive periods of starvation due to their position atop the social order...

Chronic, prolonged periods of malnutrition put our heart and organs under such strain that living into your late 30s would have been a gift were you a normal ancient notwithstanding the potential for a violent death....a simple wound in a grossly malnourished body was a possible death sentence in antiquity...
To say nothing of the ancient "doctors" treatment practices which routinely contributed to death as recently as the turn of the 20th century..

-Christosterone

a reply to: Christosterone

To reiterate
www.ancient-origins.net...

If we look again at the estimated maximum life expectancy for prehistoric humans, which is 35 years, we can see that this does not mean that the average person living at this time died at the age of 35. Rather, it means that for every child that died in infancy, another person might have lived to be 70. The life expectancy statistic is, therefore, a deeply flawed way to think about the quality of life of our ancient ancestors.

a reply to: Spider879

Crazy bastards! Even allowing for those that survived, I would not like to have been a 'patient' of surgery at any point in history before the 20th Century.

Pre-stainless steel. No knowledge of keeping things sterile. No decent anaesthetic. Dirty dressings. Flies.

a reply to: Marduk

Again, life spans have only recently eclipsed those magical numbers on a regular basis...

You are simply wrong and that link is a very well constructed fiction...

My wife is a physician and the life span in cultures who still maintain a somewhat archaic existence die very, very young by western standards...this is not conjecture but an empirical fact...

-Christosterone

Interestingly, archaeologists also managed to discover the remains of a dog - archaeozoology analysis showed that it was also part of the diet of people of that time! Read more at archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com...

The more interesting part of the article.

About the hole in the head... amm, it's probably specially carved so UFOs can land there.

originally posted by: Kandinsky
a reply to: Spider879

Crazy bastards! Even allowing for those that survived, I would not like to have been a 'patient' of surgery at any point in history before the 20th Century.

Pre-stainless steel. No knowledge of keeping things sterile. No decent anaesthetic. Dirty dressings. Flies.

Okay.
So what would you do to let the demon out of your head?

Harte

originally posted by: Christosterone
You are simply wrong and that link is a very well constructed fiction...

My wife is a physician and the life span in cultures who still maintain a somewhat archaic existence die very, very young by western standards...this is not conjecture but an empirical fact...

-Christosterone

Right, so you're saying that to work out an average life expectancy, you first exclude all the dead children


you should probably go ask your wife again, because that's not how you do it