Strange Marks On The 2,000-Year-Old Warrior's Skull Reveal The Amazing Ability Of The Ancients

Experts said that the traces proved a successful surgery on a warrior.

The Daily Mail, on January 17, reported that the Oklahoma’s Museum of Osteology claimed that the skull, belonging to a Peruvian warrior, was broken in a battle. The doctors at that time implanted a piece of metal to repair the fracture.
Experts believed that the warrior survived the surgery, and the metal skull was the key evidence to prove that ancient people were capable of performing complex and advanced surgeries.
The skull in question has an elongated structure, typical of the Peruvians. The ancient Peruvians had a form of body modification, in which members deliberately deformed the skulls of young children by tying them with cloth or pressing them with two pieces of wood when the child was just a baby.

Source: Museum of Osteology

"This is a Peruvian elongated skull with metal surgically implanted after returning from battle, estimated to be from about 2000 years ago. One of our more interesting and oldest pieces in the collection," said a museum representative.
"We don't have a ton of background on this piece, but we do know he survived the procedure. Based on the broken bone surrounding the repair, you can see that it's tightly fused together. It was a successful surgery," added the representative.
The skull was originally kept in the museum’s private collection, but news of its discovery quickly spread, making it famous and eventually leading to the skull being officially on public display.

Source: Museum of Osteology

The area in Peru where the skull was discovered, has long been famous for its surgeons, who invented a series of complex procedures to treat skull fractures.
Head injuries were commonplace in Peru 2,000 years ago due to the use of projectiles like slingshots (an ancient weapon typically used for shooting small stones) during battles.
Surgeons at that time would cut a hole in the skull of an injured warrior without the use of modern sterile techniques or anesthesia.

Source: Google Street View

"They learned early on that this was a treatment that could save lives. We have overwhelming evidence that trepanation was not done to increase consciousness or as a purely ritual activity but is linked to patients with severe head injury, [especially] skull fracture," said John Verano, an anthropologist at Tulane University (USA) to National Geographic in 2016.
"We don't know the metal. Traditionally, silver and gold was used for this type of procedure," shared a spokesperson for the Museum of Osteology.
H/T: Daily Mail Online