Some cultures in different places and times have practiced deliberately deforming their children’s skulls, usually flattening or elongating, in order to achieve some strange ideal of beauty. This photo shows two skulls that could human-Xenomorph hybrids by the look of them. My question is what the hell did this do to peoples’s brains? Has the practice survived into modern times and ever been studied by neurologists?
Can you check that link, please? All I get is the Britannica Online Encyclopedia home page with a picture of Arnold Palmer.
Link works fine for me…
Home page/Arnold Palmer in Firefox, elongated skulls in IE.
I’m using I.E., and I still get Arnold Palmer.
I gave the address Google gave me; here’s the “link to this page” address: http://www.britannica.com/eb/art-94637
Firefox 2.0.0.13, elongated skulls for me
“An error occurred while trying to display this page.”
Not working for me, either.
Eh…here’s the company page that the encyclopedia got the pictures from.
The replicas are for sale, too. And at a reasonable price. Frikkin awesome…
Well, now that’s settled, does anyone know the answer to the OP? I’ve often wondered that, too.
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Man, am I thirsty for some iced tea and lemonade. What do they call that again?
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I got a Britannica page, but with a video about MacArthur wanting to use nukes in Korea.
Something I had heard is that people with these kinds of skulls suffered from hydrocephalus.
The cerebrospinal fluid that cushions your brain and spinal cord is made by special structures within the cavities of your brain. It then flows (really slowly) down a little canal over your brain stem, out into the space around your spinal cord. Screwing with the shape of the skull logically would stopper up this drainage. Apparently, some of the skull have signs of trepanation, evidence of attempts to relieve the pressure.
Sorry, but I can’t find a reputable link now. Everything on google is traipsing on about Alien modification of humans :rolleyes:
My limited understanding is that the practice died out thousands of years before western contact with South America.
I’ve seen some of those skulls at some museum in Peru, I believe. I was under the impression that it was actually done to Royals, or something like that. Pretty strange sense of aesthetics, though.
Me too, and worse, in Cuzco. A full cone-head with a hole at the top, from skull-binding. Allegedly it was to make the skull look like a mountain.
I would have expected to see something like that in France but not in Peru.
Wasn’t there a native tribe in the Americas called the flat heads that did this in a milder form?
If I recall, it was see along the northwest coast of North America.
There are also groups in Africa that practice some forms of skull deformation.
Did it turn them into mathematics honor students?