Biblical city yields unusual case of 3,500-year-old head surgery

[Warpy]

1. Cranial surgery was one of the common ones in prehistory

and a lot of people survived it, many showing the signs of years of healing around the drill hole.

I think a lot of it was an attempt to treat migraine. I've had a lot of bad ones where I'd have gone for it, just on the off chance it would relieve some of the pressure and let the pain out through the hole, such is the nature of migraine. They suck and opiates make mine worse, not better. When opiates failed back then, they probably brought out the drills. I just wonder if it worked.

We don't know how precise their knowledge of anatomy was back then or how sophisticated their medical knowledge, so much has been lost through millennia of empire building and organized warfare, not to mention destruction of ancient texts by waves of new religions. Oetzi, the man found preserved in Alpine ice, has tats that suspiciously resemble acupuncture points, and we know he suffered from Lyme disease and arthritis.

Speculation is all we've got to work with after all this time, and mine says the treatment was for migraine. I don't know if they were far enough advanced to realize epilepsy was in the brain or how to differentiate tumors from normal tissue or have the skill to remove them. Migraines are an obvious choice.