Did you know that? Several heart transplants were performed 100,000 years ago!

In 1969, the Soviet professor Leonidof Marmadjaidjan, head of a group of researchers from the universities of Leningrad and Ashgabat, made an exploration in Central Asia.... and he discovered a necropolis in a cave!

Imagine that this cavity closed a common grave in which his team found about thirty skeletons in excellent condition... ok. Why not! But, wait a minute... After a carbon 14 dating and a second more thorough expertise, they had to admit it: these skeletons were about 100 000 years old!

Moreover, the report of this study was published by these scientists in 1969 under the title "Report of the scientific expedition Marmadjaidjan in Soviet Central Asia" for the Union Society of Anthropology of Turkmenistan.

But this is not all!

In this report, you can also read that 8 of these skeletons presented serious injuries at the level of the bones, injuries which were made while they were still alive: it would probably be the consequences of a fight against animals, since some bones were marked by claw prints and others by traces of very powerful bites.

But... I'm not done! Sit down!

Because, even more surprising, some of these skeletons showed traces of surgery, and not the least! The ribs had been resected, the rib cage had been spread wide and the bones were completely healed. These men had survived several years of these operations, one of which had the same advanced technical characteristics as those performed (and successful "for the first time"!!!) by Professor Christiaan Barnard during his first heart transplants at the end of the 1960s!

Stone of Ica belonging to Doctor Cabrera representing the various stages of a heart transplant in the so-called prehistoric era (Source: book by Robert Charroux)

Certainly, it is well known that Saints Cosmas and Damian, the patron saints of doctors, had themselves performed, in the third century, a leg transplant, which is represented on many altarpieces and in many paintings. A graft which marked the spirits through the centuries since it was about grafting the leg of an Ethiopian on a white man.

A verger's dream- Saints Cosmas and Damian performing a miraculous cure by transplantation of a leg. Oil painting attributed to the Master of Los Balbases, ca. 1495

Earlier in history, we know the great medical skill of the Egyptians (to which I will return because there is much to say). Not to mention the operations on bones had been observed on skeletons from the Near East dated 50,000 years ago... But here, we are talking about the so-called Neanderthal era!

So, were they really that primitive or did others practice, alongside them, these elitist medical techniques?

Unless it is the Carbon 14 that is good to throw away and, with it, all the dating that it allows, thus putting a lot of things in question!

In any case, this is the thorny discovery that Robert Charroux relays to us once again and which leaves us, once again, dreaming...

Sources: Robert Charroux, Le livre de ses livres, chapitre "A la recherche du passé mystérieux), éd. Robert Laffont, 1985

Jović NJ, Theologou M., "The miracle of the black leg: E astern neglect of Western addition to the hagiography of Saints Cosmas and Damian". Acta Med Hist Adriat. 2015, vol. 13 n° 2, pp. 329-44.