Ancient medicine gets talked about in extremes. Either people assume everyone died from a splinter, or they assume the past was packed with secret geniuses doing modern surgery with rocks. This new find sits in the middle, and that’s why it’s so fascinating. A 2,500-year-old Pazyryk woman in southern Siberia took a serious head injury that destroyed the jaw joint that lets you chew and talk, and someone tried to make the joint work again.
Researchers only saw the full picture after they examined her skull with CT imaging, which let them look beneath preserved tissue without damaging what the permafrost kept intact. Archaeologist Natalia Polosmak put it plainly in a statement quoted by Live Science. “The opportunity to study it on a CT scanner was a fortunate opportunity, which I took advantage of.”
2,500-Year-Old Skull Reveals a Brutal Iron Age Surgery, and an Unlikely Survivor
The scans showed the woman’s right temporomandibular joint, your TMJ hinge near the ear, had been destroyed. That injury can make eating a daily grind and make speech extremely hard. The team suggested a horse accident as a possible cause, which fits a culture known for riding.
Then the researchers found evidence of an attempt at reconstruction. They identified thin channels drilled into the two bones that form the joint, plus traces of horsehair or animal tendon threaded through those channels. Radiologist Andrey Letyagin described it as a “primitive prosthetic” that “held the articular surfaces together and allowed the patient to move her jaw.”
Before anyone turns this into a miracle story, Letyagin added a reality check. “The joint functioned, but she still couldn’t chew food on the injured side, likely due to severe pain,” he said. So yes, the jaw moved, but life still came with consequences.
The strongest evidence that the procedure happened during her life comes from what her body did next. The team observed new bone tissue around the drilled channels, a sign of healing over time. Her teeth support the same idea. The left side showed wear and chipping consistent with someone chewing mainly on that side, because the right side had become a problem she had to manage every day.
Vladimir Kanygin, head of the Laboratory of Nuclear and Innovative Medicine at Novosibirsk State University, said the scans helped the team “diagnose the injury” and “reconstruct the results of a complex surgical intervention performed in ancient times.” Letyagin said, “It is possible that we have discovered evidence of such a surgical procedure for the first time,” since the team hadn’t encountered it in the scientific literature.
The Pazyryk already have evidence of trepanation, skull drilling, in other remains, but this jaw repair sits in a different category. Somebody decided a young woman with a broken jaw still deserved a functional mouth, then they tried their best.
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