#cranial modification

Ancient tombs in China have produced what may be some of the oldest known human skulls to be intentionally reshaped.

At a site called Houtaomuga, scientists unearthed 25 skeletons dating to between around 12,000 years ago and 5,000 years ago. Of those, 11 featured skulls with artificially elongated braincases and flattened bones at the front and back of the head, says a team led by bioarchaeologist Quanchao Zhang and paleoanthropologist Qian Wang.

Skull modification occurred over a longer stretch of time at the site than at any other archaeological dig, the researchers report online June 25 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Permanent reshaping of a skull early in life, when cranial bones are soft, can be achieved by compressing an infant’s head with one’s hands. Binding the head with hard, flat surfaces such as boards or tightly wrapping the head in cloth similarly remodels immature cranial bones. Specific head modifications may have been used as signs of social status.

Oddly shaped, intentionally modified skulls have been found in many parts of the world. Claims from the 1980s that two roughly 45,000-year-old Neandertal skulls had been reshaped early in life have been dismissed by many researchers. The earliest skulls with generally accepted signs of cranial modification date to between around 13,000 and 10,000 years ago in western Asia, southeastern Australia and now, East Asia. In the Americas, this practice began more than 8,000 years ago (SN Online: 2/13/18).

“It is too early to tell whether intentional cranial modification first emerged in East Asia and spread elsewhere or originated independently in different places,” says Wang, of Texas A&M University in Dallas.

Experts speculate that the widespread tradition could stem from a host of motivations, not the least beauty. The latest hypothesis to join the list, however, is the belief that skull shaping could have been a boon for survival to some who practiced it, as proposed by Marta Alfonso-Durruty, an anthropologist at Kansas State University, and colleagues in a new research paper published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

The team examined 60 skulls from a group of hunter-gatherers that lived in Southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego 2,000 years ago, Hogenboom writes. Thirty percent of the skulls showed signs of intentional deformation, the first evidence that people in Patagonia practiced such modification, which could have become widespread because, like tribal tattoos or team jerseys, it promoted group cohesion. Unlike clothing, however, body modification permanently differentiates in-group members from outsiders.

In Patagonia however, the hunter gatherers with modified skulls lived in more diffuse groups, created by the need to move from place to place in search off food in a resource-scarce region. Building relationships with individuals to gain access to certain areas would have been valuable. Modified skulls could have served that purpose, signaling a trusted, connected person. Hogenboom elaborates:

[H]aving an oddly-shaped skull proved they had acquired information on how to do so from another trusted group. "It was a social strategy that allowed individuals to access resources, that were at times unpredictable, across a large territory," Alfonso-Durruty says.

The practice has also extended into modern times. In a region of Western France, people were still binding the heads of their children in the early 1900s. The practice, called bandeau, was thought to protect the infants from accidents and may or may not have been intentionally creating the altered head shape that experts called the "Toulouse Deformity." Chris White reports for Atlas Obscura that people in Russia, Scandinavia and the Caucasus also practiced cranial deformation at that time. Today, some groups in Polynesia as well as the people of the Mangbetu tribe in Congo still sometimes elongate their children’s heads.

Three skulls exemplifying different forms of cranial modification and an infant mummy

Cranial modification was particularly notorious as it was used on the South Coast of Peru (Nazca, Paracas cultures) to express ethnic and other facets of the identity and affiliation of individuals. Cranial modification is the culmination of applying pressure to the skull of an infant, usually by impressing the head with a wooden board, and thus allowing the molded skull to develop into the desired shape as the individual matures. As the process was conducted in infancy, while the brain was still malleable, cranial modification did not lead to mental disabilities or bodily dysfunction.

The coast societies of Peru are organized in ways very different from the highlands. Whereas in the highlands communities were often economically self-sufficient based on a vertical archipelago in which a single community produced the entire plethora of necessary goods for societal equilibrium, the coasts of Peru instead opted towards a horizontal archipelago, where every community focused on a particular craft or method of subsistence which they would then export to their surrounding, dependent communities, and vice versa. On the north coast of Peru we know that the cultural gap between these communities was so pronounced that certain professions actually spoke completely different languages or dialects, as exemplified by the case of the Quingnam language, a language once spoken exclusively by north coast fishermen.

On the south coast of Peru the morphology of cranial modification seems to have been directly indicative of a person's community and also their profession. Some communities would even modify the skulls of their citizens to resemble the peaks of the community's local sacred mountain-deity, or apu.

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