Edgard Camarós and his team were looking at a screen connected to a powerful camera aimed at an Egyptian skull from about 4,500 years ago. What they saw changed the previously understood timeline of when humans may have tried to treat cancer. The image on the screen was definitive, he said — “It was clear that we were looking at a milestone in the history of medicine” — but nobody spoke for a few seconds.

“That was one of those eureka moments,” he told The Washington Post. Camarós, a professor of archaeology at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and his team say they found proof that moves forward our understanding of when humans tried to treat cancer by 1,000 years. He and his team published a report Wednesday in the Frontiers in Medicine journal, detailing how they found markings indicating that ancient scientists were trying to remove cancer from a skull.

Cancer was the second-leading cause of death in 2022 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with 608,000. Any multicellular life form is at risk of cancer, Camarós said. Even the dinosaurs were prone to cancer.

“If we understand how cancer evolves, we may understand about ourselves,” he said. And if researches can find out how certain cancers changed or vanished, maybe they can better tackle modern-day forms of the disease. To Camarós, oncology isn’t just about the past 20 years of successful innovation but also about thousands of years .