Every So Often A Discovery Is Made,

that turns conventional thinking on it's head,

photograph T. R. Maloney et al./Nature, and this is one of them, a skeleton discovered in the Indonesian part of Borneo shows signs of sophisticated amputation surgery performed 31,000 years ago. That's 20,000 years earlier than we had evidence of before. A person of unknown sex died at around 19 or 20 years of age, and was missing a foot from surgical amputation, from the article:

'The lower third of the person’s leg was missing, and the tibia and fibula — the bones between the knee and ankle — ended in a clean cut. This level of precision indicates that the limb was not lost in an accident or an animal attack. The bones lacked the type of mark typically left by an infection, suggesting that the wound had been cleaned and protected from contamination. Furthermore, the small size of the left tibia and fibula compared with the right ones and the healing of the bones show that the amputation occurred during childhood and at least six to nine years before death.'

 archaeologists once described southeast Asia “as a cultural backwater”, says study co-author India Dilkes-Hall, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth. “There’s always been this trope that not a lot happened there.” but the discovery challenges this idea, revealing that people living in Borneo thousands of years ago were highly skilled at medicine. “It’s pushing forth the right idea that this is an incredibly complex area,” adds Dilkes-Hall, perhaps the 'primitives' were not so primitive at all! for the full fascinating article have a look here.