Even though I started trying to contact material witnesses in the late 1990s I was too late to get first hand reports from the WW II construction crew at Shemya Island that came across large skulls that were trepanned. Although such crainial interventions are known elsewhere, it has long been my suspicion, based on my own experience with ginkgo’s enhancement of cerebral perfusion, that such interventions may have been an early version of what Timothy Leary called I²: Application of intelligence to increase intelligence – particularly as grains cause a spike in glucose that could increase energy to the brain but, in hunter-gatherer genotypes – results in an insulin spike that over-corrects and deprives the brain of energy: Hence the rising popularity of “paleo” diets.
The coastal position of Paracas and, of course, Shemya (where the skulls were purportedly found midst seafood middens), point to a diet rich in “brain food” that may have, during the neolithic’s rise of starch availability, resulted in a crisis resulting in such cranial interventions.
Genetic differences?
It’s hard enough to get clean “ancient” DNA from skeletons that aren’t subject to concerns about “The Narrative” – so I don’t hold out much hope. What I do know is that my brother, an osteopath, was spooked when I showed him some of the more extreme skulls from Paracas that exhibit shall we say “problematic” morphology.
PS: I was friends with one of the anthropologists at the San Diego Museum of Man – which has (or at least had) a number of skulls exhibiting cranial deformation – so I’m quite familiar with the conventional narrative.
I remember when Americans were supposed to keep their babies lying on their backs at alltimes. i’m talkin’ the 1960s…? Even to me, totally not interested in babies or reproduction at that time, the far more prominent, rounded anterior skull of kids raised by European parents was striking. An infant’s skull is pretty malleable: could this elongation be the result of a practice of binding or confining the skull in infancy?
There is no question that many if not most elongates skulls are the result of the cranial intervention called “head binding”. Indeed that’s the explanation provided by conventional narrative for all such skulls.
There are some skulls that are not so easily shoehorned into that explanation.
In any event, even if all such skulls were so explained, the reason for doing cranial interventions – particularly in conjunction with skull surgery – is highly speculative even in the conventional narrative.
“Reason not the need…”. It’s a matter of fashion, like 18th century Frenchwomen deliberately balding themselves back to the ears, or those tribes where the women elongate their necks by wearing an increasing number of metal rings they can’t ever remove or their heads would fall off!
There are standard copes in the field of archaeology, the most common being “it was ceremonial” or “it was religious”. “Fashion” is not quite as standard, but in the case of cranial intervention, it is reasonable to classify that explanation as a “cope”.
Cranial interventions are found around the world all appearing at approximately the onset of the neolithic and not confined to or even strongly correlated by sex. There appears to be some support for the idea that it was a “status symbol” of some sort or that it was associated with “status”. In that respect there is some support for “fashion”. However, the distinction between “fashion” devoid of “need” and “tradition”, the “reason” for which has been lost in time, isn’t clear – particularly with such a widespread phenomenon. Add to that the boring a hole in the skull, which appears frequently in conjunction with the elongation intervention, and one has a “fashion” which is life threatening in those neolithic populations.
Actually, the most cogent explanation for the head and face deformation is that it was a lifelong marker of origin/affiliation. ‘This person is from the xxx valley group/tribe.’ indelible marker.
It carried a heavy cost, especially in hard times. The process started un early infancy. Sometimes the wrappings were too tight, gravely restricting venous return. I’ve sadly observed infants with their bindings still in situ, dead from septicaemia brought on by bacterial showers when they started cutting teeth. Survivors sometimes showed enamel defects caused by fever from fighting infection suffered at the same age.
Trephination reason? This deformation would have forced the brain expansion to go wherever it could escape constriction, causing premature closing of some sutures, possibly interfering with cerebrospinal fluid circulation return. Maybe this was ann effort to buffer intracranial pressure?
IIRC, some years ago there was a fad for certain individuals drilling their own heads to ‘balance’ intracranial pressure.
If anyone’s intertested, I can probably elaborate, but not immediately, as I’m still typing one-handed and will be for at least another fortnight.
Few would argue that neanderthals were eating grain in mass quantities.
However, this does bring up a related speculation about the larger cranial vault of neanderthals. One of the early investigators of the Paracas skulls (whose name escapes me) indicated to me he thought the dentation better matched that of neanderthals. Perhaps he was shoe-horning things to fit what he accepted as the larger cranial capacity of some of those skulls. A late colleague of mine with an exceptionally large neanderthal percentage (Randall Burns about 3.1% with mtDNA Z1a most common among Tibetans, Koreans and Japanese and I2b1 Y) and I did discuss some of the sexual implications of introgression – such as the conflict between walking upright and the increasing cranial volume of infants at birth. He had an autistic son and autism does seem associated with overdevelopment of brain tissue within restricted cranium which, in turn, would be associated with restricted cerebral perfusion. I don’t know that anyone has looked seriously at the cerebral perfusion of people with autism.
Definitely interested! Sorry to hear about your temporary one-handedness. I hope it is not painful, and that you are able to resume normal operations in the not-too-distant future.
Even so, that would tend to debunk my functional hypothesis of head binding, that being to enhance cerebral perfusion (cerebral blood flow especially into the smallest capillaries), which is the opposite of restricting (compromising) blood flow.
I’m aware of the “bore hole” fad that took hold in the 1960s with Amanda Fielding – part of the psychedelic experimentation era with a revival in the 1990s – which they thought would enhance cerebral blood flow – but none of them were “coneheads”. That’s what reminded me of the San Diego Museum of Man collection of elongated skulls and, in conjunction with my own experiences with ginkgo, wondering if there might have been a cerebral blood flow function to head binding. But if head binding restricts cerebral blood flow then it would, as you say, explain why elongated skulls were so frequently trepanned.
