This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

A bit later in the hour, it's your chance to get involved in cutting-edge astronomy research,

and we'll tell you how to hunt for distant galaxies.

But first, around 5,000 years ago, back before we knew any better, people went around drilling holes in their skulls.

Well, the Y is still unclear, but if you were an ancient healer getting ready to administer this treatment to a person,

you might want to do what modern medicine does, and that is practice on a non-human first.

And scientists report this week that they've uncovered the skull of a cow with a hole in its skull that likely played guinea pig to one of those surgeries.

Here with the details, as well as other short subjects in sciences, Annaline Newitts culture editor for Ars Tectica.

Welcome back to Science Friday.

Hey, thanks for having me back.

You're welcome.

So people really did this with animals?

So now we have evidence that they did.

This is a 5,000-year-old cow skull that was discovered in France.

And at first, scientists thought that this perfect hole in its forehead was from a fight, fight basically with another cow that had jammed

its horn into the skull but after analysis and really looking at it under the microscope they

saw that the hole was surrounded by all of these little tiny knife cuts these telltale signs

that actually someone had used some kind of stone knife to

grind a hole in the skull. And it's exactly the same kind of pattern that we see on human

skulls that have been given this rather dubious medical treatment that was very, very popular in

prehistory. It was. I mean, 5,000 years ago, people were doing this to themselves, you're saying.

Yeah, and it's called trepination. It means putting a hole in your skull. And we see it all across the

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