Trepanation in France during Neolithic time

Abstract : For thousands of years  women and men have accomplished impressive feats in surgery, let's go back to one of the oldest methods: trepanation, which is a  hale in  the skull produced  in  vivo surgically. Since it was  first  discovered,  the  subject  has been highly  controversial  in the scientific world. lndeed there was a frenzy around this practice without consideration to differential diagnosis, but cranial defects may be induced by pathological, physiological, or even taphonomic processes [4].

Nobody knows why trepanation began. Sorne researchers  argue that it was  systematically carried out to relieve the patient from epilepsy [5] whereas others think it was used for another reason; perhaps religious  as there was no proof of pathology  on some trepanned skulls [7]. This question is still at the heart of the trepanation debate. The scientific community attributes the inception of this method to the Neolithic period because there is no proof of trepanation before [2]. To this day, it is extremely complicated to distinguish trepanations from pseudo-trepanations and in the beginning many authors assumed  that a skull was trepanned  whereas it was just pathological.  However, it is difficult to classify the different types because three types of trepanation exist: ante mortem, peri mortem and post mortem, but it is not possible to distinguish the last two as in the two cases there are no signs of healing.

Europe was the historie birthplace [4] and with nearly seventy archaeological sites, France is an essential  center for the study of Neolithic trepanations.  lt is important to remember  that trepanations were practiced a lot during the Neolithic. Many questions arise about this theme especially. Were certain age categories  trepanned  in France during Neolithic  time? Was it just for one sex or bath?  [7]. ln order to improve our comprehension of the subject, a lot of bibliographical research was done for this symposium but most research  is quite dated. There are some articles  that  inventoried trepanned skulls to understand  who were trepanned  and if they survived afterwards [3]. For example,  the excavation of the collective burial at Les Grands Causses (Aveyron, France) showed that 70 percent out of 127 skulls survived after trepanation [1]. This demonstrated that trepanation was mastered without any sterilization [6]. However, the validity of these findings requires further investigation, specifically regarding the results of the author's sex and age determination.

The subject of trepanation is still unclear for the entire scientific community and we cannot affirm things about  this method, but we are able to make an inventory of what has been done before and discuss if all these results are robust and reliable.