Two false mummy toes from Egypt may have
actually strutted their stuff as functional big-toe prostheses for their
owners, researchers have found.

The two toes — the Greville Chester housed in the British Museum and the Cairo toe
at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo — date back to before 600 B.C., which
the researchers say is much earlier than what had been considered the
earliest known practical prosthesis (called the Roman Capua leg dating
to around 300 B.C.).

"We may just have the evidence to suggest
that nascent prosthetic science was beginning to emerge in the Nile
valley many hundreds of years earlier than in ancient Capua [where the
Roman prosthesis was found]," the researchers wrote in the Feb. 12 issue
of the journal The Lancet. "Perhaps now attribution for the first
glimmers of this branch of medicine should be firmly laid at the feet of
the ancient Egyptians."