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For more than 5,300 years, it lay undisturbed beneath a Stone Age tomb in northern Spain, hidden among the remains of nearly 100 people. When archaeologists finally uncovered the ancient skull, they expected another glimpse into prehistoric life. Instead, they found evidence of something far more extraordinary. Careful examination revealed that the woman had undergone not one but two complex ear surgeries thousands of years before modern medicine existed. Even more astonishing, signs of new bone growth showed she survived both procedures, making the discovery the world’s earliest known physical evidence of ear surgery and rewriting what scientists know about prehistoric healthcare.The skull was unearthed in 2018 from the Dolmen of El Pendón, a large Neolithic burial monument near Reinoso in Spain’s Burgos province. The tomb, which dates back to between 3800 BCE and 3000 BCE, served as a collective burial site for around 100 individuals. Among them was the skull of an elderly woman, believed to have been around 65 years old, whose remains would become the focus of an extraordinary scientific investigation.