Elongated ancient skulls have long been touted as evidence for alien visitation by certain fringe history groups, but a recent feature article on LiveScience points out that the cultural practice of modifying skulls is in fact extremely widespread across the world, and has been for thousands of years – right up till the modern day.
“Cranial modification has been found in skulls from Europe, the Near East, Africa, Asia and Oceania,” bioarchaeologist Matthew Velasco points out. And although it is most strongly associated with the Americas, “that doesn’t necessarily mean it was more common there; rather, evidence of shaped heads may have been better preserved in the Andes, where the cool, dry conditions did not degrade mummified remains as quickly.”
According to the LiveScience article, archaeologists have found elongated skulls “on every continent except Antarctica” – and whatsmore, “it seems to have been independently invented in multiple places.”
And the deliberate modification of human craniums likely has very deep roots in history:
[T]he oldest archaeological evidence of head shaping comes from Australia. Two artificially flattened skulls were discovered in the southern state of Victoria at the site of Kow Swamp, which is at least 13,000 years old.
And ancient skulls reveal the practice boomed in the Neolithic period, appearing in Europe around 12,500 years ago, in China around 11,000 years ago, and in what is now Iran around 10,000 years ago…
Experts have identified a vast array of apparatuses were used to modify craniums, but “the most typical method would be just wrapping the baby’s head circumferentially and making a longer, more conical shape,” bioarchaeologist Christina Torres told LiveScience, with head wrapping beginning by around 6 months of age and ending within a year or two.
And just as cranial modification has been found in a number of countries, and many techniques used, there also seem to be a wealth of reasons behind the practice. In some places it seems to have been a marker of group status, other places clan membership, and in some cases for aesthetic reasons, a beauty standard like foot binding is today in places in Asia. Meanwhile, the Collagua people of Peru “told the Spanish that they shaped the heads of their children like the mountain from which they come,” Velasco says. And among the pre-hispanic people of the Andes, it was “basically a child-rearing practice,” Torres says. “In the same way that some people swaddle their children, the same way that there’s religious circumcision, you bind the heads of your children because that is what we do to our children.”
A surprising fact about cranial modification also is that, while many people think it was an ancient practice (which it was), it persisted in cultures across the world right up to modern times. It was documented less than a century ago in the Arawe people in Papua New Guinea and –as the LiveScience article points out – even in the early 20th century in France, “where some parents chose to band their newborns’ heads immediately after birth for up to four years in a practice called bandeau, which practitioners thought protected babies from injury.” This so-called “Toulouse deformity” declined in popularity and disappeared by World War I.
The key thing to remember is that, while we in the 21st century might find the idea of modifying the cranium to be a weird thing to do, we do other ‘similar’ things that other cultures might give side-eye to – many of which also have ancient origins:
The practice of shaping an infant’s head to look like an “alien’s” may seem foreign or bizarre to us in the 21st century. But the human body has long been a canvas for cultural, spiritual and personal expression.
The earliest known tattoos date back at least 5,000 years in Copper Age Europe, tooth filing and “grills” go back 2,000 years to the Maya, and neck elongation was practiced 1,000 years ago in Southeast Asia. Today, we tend to modify the soft tissues of our bodies through common practices like ear piercing and circumcision, but also more uncommon procedures like horn implants, eyeball tattooing and Brazilian butt lifts.
As bioarchaeologist Matthew Velasco points out to LiveScience: “Cranial modification is part of a practice that is universal: body modification and presentation.”
