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archeologist in Spain have excavate a buffet Roman - geological era skull that bears mark of violent trauma and may entertain signaling of a brain tumor . However , not everyone is convert that this battle - marred human beings had a neoplasm , with one expert telling Live Science the findings are ambiguous .
The skull , discovered in 2019 during a caving military expedition to the Sima de Marcenejas in northerly Spain , date stamp to between A.D. 258 and 409 and belonged to a man who was probable between 30 and 40 years old when he died , perhaps only decades before thefall of the Western Roman Empire .
The skull, pictured above, before it was restored by the team.
The exterior of the skull harbored three wound , which formed before he kick the bucket and were likely triggered by one or more wild onrush . The other was on the inside and may have been the resultant of a rough-cut type of mind tumor called ameningioma , which would make it the first jazz type in an archaeological specimen found in the Iberian Peninsula .
" What is interesting about this finding is that it offers a windowpane onto the wellness of past population , and raises fundamental interrogative sentence for us about the ability of individual to survive these conditions , and their character of life thereafter , " lead authorDaniel Rodríguez - Iglesias , an archeologist at the Spanish National Research Center for Human Evolution ( CENIEH ) , tell in astatement .
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The authors usedmicro - computed tomography(microCT ) to build a 3D model of the inside and exterior of the skull . The open lesions ranged from 0.29 to 0.7 in ( 0.7 to 1.8 centimeter ) long and 0.04 to 0.59 inch ( 0.1 to 1.5 cm ) wide . The lesion were on the top of the head , suggesting trigger-happy trauma rather than an accidental fall .
The privileged wound , however , could have been a meningioma , the authors hypothesise . They compare the lesion with a modern meningioma in a42 - year - old womanand see that the diachronic lesion was similar in location , size and shape . They ruled out cause such as metabolic or infective disease because there was only one interior wound and no signboard of tissue thickening between the two layer of os in the skull .
But not everyone is win over that the internal lesion is a wit neoplasm .
" In contrast to the traumatic lesion on the ectocranial [ outside ] aerofoil , which are quite clean , the lesion interpreted as induce by a possible meningioma is quite ambiguous,“Christian Meyer , head of OsteoARC in Germany , who was not demand in the study , tell Live Science in an email .
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The determination were publish July 28 in the journalVirtual Archaeology Review .
