from link in OPParacas is a desert peninsula located within the Pisco Province in the Ica Region, on the south coast of Peru.
It is here were Peruvian archaeologist, Julio Tello, made an amazing discovery in 1928, a massive and elaborate graveyard containing tombs filled with the remains of individuals with the largest elongated skulls found anywhere in the world.
These have come to be known as the ‘Paracas skulls’. In total, Tello found more than 300 of these elongated skulls, which are believed to date back around 3,000 years.
A DNA analysis has now been conducted on one of the skulls and expert Brien Foerster has released preliminary information regarding these enigmatic skulls. It is well-known that most cases of skull elongation are the result of cranial deformation, head flattening, or head binding, in which the skull is intentionally deformed by applying force over a long period of time.
It is usually achieved by binding the head between two pieces of wood, or binding in cloth.
However, while cranial deformation changes the shape of the skull, it does not alter its volume, weight, or other features that are characteristic of a regular human skull. The Paracas skulls, however, are different.
The cranial volume is up to 25 percent larger and 60 percent heavier than conventional human skulls, meaning they could not have been intentionally deformed through head binding/flattening.
They also contain only one parietal plate, rather than two. The fact that the skulls’ features are not the result of cranial deformation means that the cause of the elongation is a mystery, and has been for decades.
Mr. Juan Navarro, owner and director of the local museum, called the Paracas History Museum, which houses a collection of 35 of the Paracas skulls, allowed the taking of samples from 5 of the skulls.
The samples consisted of hair, including roots, a tooth, skull bone and skin, and this process was carefully documented via photos and video. The samples were sent to the late Lloyd Pye, founder of the Starchild Project, who delivered the samples to a geneticist in Texas for DNA testing.
The results are now back, and Brien Foerster, author of more than ten books and an authority on the ancient elongated headed people of South America, has just revealed the preliminary results of the analysis.
He reports on the geneticist's findings:
"It had mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) with mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far. But a few fragments I was able to sequence from this sample indicate that if these mutations will hold we are dealing with a new human-like creature, very distant from Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans."
"The implications are huge."
“I am not sure it will even fit into the known evolutionary tree,” the geneticist wrote.
He added that if the Paracas individuals were so biologically different, they would not have been able to interbreed with humans.
The results need to be replicated and more analysis undertaken before final conclusions can be drawn. We will update when more details emerge.
lkb3rd said:You'd think on a discussion forum for those interested in unusual topics there would be more interest in discussion.
A level headed review of the article here...http://www.peruthisweek.com/blogs-calm-down-the-paracas-skulls-are-not-from-alien-beings-102258theyithian said:I'm sure this is reported in more depth elsewhere, but I spotted it on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QnF_RvE ... 4-overview
Paracas skulls
Calm down, the Paracas skulls are not from alien beings.
Why you should be skeptical of the recent genetic testing done on the Paracas skulls— and it’s not for the reason you might think. ...
Yesterday, I wrote an article about a set of genetic tests done on a sample from one of the famous elongated Paracas skulls, which are 3,000 years old and were found in southern Peru. The basic news was this: some genetic tests had found DNA in the skulls that was reportedly previously “unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far.” The implication, helped by the distinctly B-movie “alien” appearance of the skulls, was that the skulls must contain extraterrestrial DNA. Scientists and archaeologists generally believe that the skulls’ strange appearance is the result of intentional deformation practiced by the Paracas culture.
I saw this story floating around in the paranormal blogosphere for a few days before I decided to report on it. I ignored it, frankly, until it was picked up by Yahoo! and the International Business Times, as well as a few smaller news sources around the world. So I wrote a short article, mostly because it was a silly story that was fun to write about after a morning of writing about human trafficking and illegal gold mining.
But I find this story really, really irritating. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the alien part of this story that bothers me. I believe in the possibility of aliens. More than anything, it bothers me that established news sites apparently failed to do even cursory research on the background of the story before publishing it.
Let’s start with a quick talk about aliens. In an infinite universe, it seems foolhardy— even arrogant— to completely dismiss the idea of extraterrestrial life. There are so many galaxies, so many planets, so many suns; across the neverending expanse of space, one suspects that there must be another group of intelligent beings somewhere.
But suspect is the key word there. We have no credible evidence for the existence of alien civilizations. As Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And claiming that the Paracas skulls are possibly alien is certainly extraordinary. So let’s look at the evidence— does it measure up?
Well, the short answer is no. First, consider the source: the preliminary results of genetic testing were announced by Brien Foerster, who is the assistant director of the Paracas History Museum.
That’s a pretty impressive title, and I’ll admit that it threw me. That title implies formal archaeological, curatorial, or history credentials, maybe a body of peer-reviewed research projects. That title implies that he has serious academic credibility, and that we should listen to his announcements about his areas of expertise.
None of this is true. Some pretty basic Google research turns up some facts about Foerster that cast his announcement in an entirely different light.
First, his academic credentials: by cobbling information together from the webpage of his company Hidden Inca Tours and his official Facebook page, it appears that he has a Bachelor of Science from the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada. Foerster doesn’t offer any further information about his educational background, including his exact field of undergraduate study. I was unable to find any evidence of an advanced degree.
Foerster’s company, Hidden Inca Tours, is a travel agency that specializes in taking travelers on paranormal tours around the world, but focuses on Peru and the surrounding region. Foerster has also written a number of books on archaeology, including one called “The Enigma of Cranial Deformation: Elongated Skulls of the Ancients,” which he wrote with David Hatcher Childress. Vanderbilt University archaeologist Charles E. Orser once called Childress “one of the most flagrant violators of basic archaeological reasoning.”
So what about his role as assistant director at the Paracas History Museum? How did a paranormal tour operator get that job?
Well, first, the Paracas History Museum is a private museum. It’s owned by one Juan Navarro, who is also its director. Navarro is also listed on the Hidden Inca Tours webpage as a member of “Our Team of Experts.” I was unable to find any mention of academic credentials earned by Navarro, either.
My preoccupation with academic credentials is not meant to downplay the immense wisdom and experience possessed by many people who do not have undergraduate or post-grad degrees. Being smart does not require a college degree. Heck, it doesn’t require any kind of education at all; it’s an innate quality.
However, scientific expertise is not an innate quality. It is something that is gained through years of study and research, both of which are usually completed in an institution that awards successful students degrees upon graduation.
To be fair, I don’t have any special academic credentials that make me an expert in archaeology or genetics. But I’m not arguing that the data is flawed— we haven’t seen the full data, and I’m not qualified to speak on that— but I am arguing that a number of features of the announcement should warn us not to take Foerster’s announcement at face value.
That brings us to the strange nature of the announcement. Foerster announced the results personally, via internet, rather than through a scientifically reputable source.
There are a number of problems with the way he announced the preliminary results. Speaking to Discovery.com, science promoter and skeptic Sharon Hill said “This is an unconventional way of making ‘groundbreaking’ claims.”
Hill added “It’s not supported by a university, but by private funding. The initial findings were released in this unprofessional way (via Facebook, websites and an Internet radio interview) obviously because Foerster and the other researchers think this is very exciting news.”
Exciting news is one thing, but scientific credibility is another. “cience doesn’t work by social media,” said Hill. “Peer review is a critical part of science and the Paracas skulls proponents have taken a shortcut that completely undermines their credibility. Appealing to the public’s interest in this cultural practice we see as bizarre — skull deformation —instead of publishing the data for peer-review examination is not going to be acceptable to the scientific community.”
There’s also the matter of the testing itself. According to Foerster, the geneticist who discovered the allegedly never-before-seen DNA, wants to remain anonymous. If that’s not a red flag for the credibility of your research, I don’t know what is.
The final nail in this story’s coffin, for me, was the revelation that Foerster had appeared on the popular History Channel program “Ancient Aliens” multiple times. In yesterday’s article, I said that the scientific and archaeological communities generally regard “Ancient Aliens” as inaccurate.
“Inaccurate.” That was an understatement.
Archaeologist Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews has this to say about “Ancient Aliens”:
“I find it incredible and frightening that a worldwide distributed television channel that bills itself as ‘The History Channel’ can broadcast such rubbish as Ancient Aliens. If it were an entertainment programme, I’d have fewer worries (although it would still make me cross); it is the implied authority of the channel (‘The History Channel’, not just any old ‘History Channel’) that makes the broadcast of this series so potentially damaging […] A channel that is making claims for its authoritative status, which offers educational resources, has a responsibility not to mislead its viewers (no doubt its executives think of them as ‘customers’). That responsibility is one that all makers and broadcasters of supposedly factual television have, but one that few of them take seriously: the responsibility to check facts.”
Foerster has not said explicitly that he believes the skulls are alien. In a YouTube interview, he said “My intent simply is to find the truth as to who these people were.”
That’s a noble goal. But if you really want to find out who the people of the Paracas culture were, speak to some archaeologists. Make your research transparent and available to the public. Have your data reviewed for journals with stringent requirements and high standards. Don’t use an historical oddity as a cheap hook for your tour company, or to sell books. If your goal is to help enrich humanity’s knowledge of our ancient past, then share your information with us instead of releasing only selected snippets of admittedly preliminary results. Otherwise, we have no reason to believe you. ...
Read "Darwin's Radio" by Greg Bear and it's sequel/s.Mind you, that sort of put-down always leaps right past the interesting point. The original choices were not confined to aliens. What if this is a beneficial mutation trying to establish itself? Only for the cone-heads with increased brainpower to be killed off by a bunch of rock-throwing man-apes while the cone-heads were still working out the industrial processes necessary to build the gun they'd thought up.
I've often wondered, having wandered in and out of religious belief, how evolution is going to manage the next stage of hominid development, since we'd likely kill off any mutants.
Read "Darwin's Radio" by Greg Bear and it's sequel/s.
12,000 Years Ago, a Boy Had His Skull Squashed into a Cone Shape. It's the Oldest Evidence of Such Head-Shaping.
Ancient people in China practiced human head-shaping about 12,000 years ago — meaning they bound some children's maturing skulls, encouraging the heads to grow into elongated ovals — making them the oldest group on record to purposefully squash their skulls, a new study finds.
While excavating a Neolithic site (the last period of the Stone Age) at Houtaomuga, Jilin province, in northeast China, the archaeologists found 11 elongated skulls — belonging to both males and females and ranging from toddlers to adults — that showed signs of deliberate skull reshaping, also known as intentional cranial modification (ICM).
"This is the earliest discovery of signs of intentional head modification in Eurasia continent, perhaps in the world," said study co-researcher Qian Wang, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Texas A&M University College of Dentistry. "If this practice began in East Asia, it likely spread westward to the Middle East, Russia and Europe through the steppes as well as eastward across the Bering land bridge to the Americas." ...
Why has this practice been used historically across so many cultures with no connection to one another?
Ancient Skeletons with Alien-Like Heads Unearthed in Croatia
Archaeologists have unearthed three ancient skeletons in Croatia — and two of them had pointy, artificially deformed skulls.
Each of those skulls had been melded into a different shape, possibly as a way to show they belonged to a specific cultural group.
Artificial cranial deformation has been practiced in various parts of the world, from Eurasia and Africa to South America. It is the practice of shaping a person's skull — such as through using tight headdresses, bandages or rigid tools — while the skull bones are still malleable in infancy.
Ancient cultures had different reasons for the practice, from indicating social status to creating what they thought was a more beautiful skull. The earliest known instance of this practice occurred 12,000 years ago in ancient China, but it's unclear if the practice spread from there or if it emerged independently in different parts of the world, according to a previous Live Science report. ...
In this case, archeologists found these three skeletons in a burial pit in Croatia's Hermanov vinograd archeological site in 2013. Between 2014 and 2017, they analyzed the skeletons using various methods, including DNA analysis and radiographic imaging— a method that involves using radiation to view the inside of an object such as a skull. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/this-h...aping-immigrants-as-the-roman-empire-crumbledThis Hungarian Village Welcomed Skull-Shaping Immigrants as The Roman Empire Crumbled
As the Roman Empire drew to a dramatic collapse towards the end of the 5th century, ripples were felt across its former territories. Balances shifted as new powers rushed to fill the vacuums Rome's retreats left behind.
The changes to the everyday lives of the people are far less well documented, but a cemetery in Pannonia Valeria - in what is now Hungary - is shedding light on the cultural upheaval. And it seems that the founders of that community welcomed newcomers - and even adopted their customs, including modifying the shape of their skulls. ...
Until around 470 CE, a site now called Mözs-Icsei dűlő was the burial ground of just such a settlement. Its 96 graves have been well documented, with work going back decades.
But archaeologists in Germany and Hungary have now closely examined the remains of 87 individuals, analysing the strontium isotopes in the bones to figure out how the community came together. ...
Using this technique, the team was able to identify three distinct populations across two or three generations buried in the Mözs-Icsei dűlő cemetery.
The first population is a small founder population. They were buried in Roman-style brick graves, with Roman and Hun style grave goods, and the strontium isotope ratios in their bones indicated a largely local diet.
The second is a foreign group of 12 individuals who seem to have arrived at the community around a decade after the founders. They all had similar strontium isotope ratios, indicating that they had a shared origin. Ten of them also had modified skulls, suggesting they practised head shaping - the use of tight cloth bindings in infancy to elongate the still-hardening skull.
We still don't know why ancient cultures practised cranial modification. Although it's dying out today, it's an ancient practice, and there's evidence for it dating back thousands of years all around the world - and, interestingly, it seems to have no effect on cognitive function.
The third, slightly later group suggests that the customs of both earlier populations seem to blend together in the following generation. Not only were there founder-style grave goods included in later burials, head shaping seems to have exploded in popularity. ...
In all, the 96 graves contained 51 individuals with deliberately modified skulls, marking the site as one of the biggest concentrations of artificial cranial deformation in the region. ...
Elongated skulls of Peru came up on today's Quora.
This particular example has a cranial capacity well in excess of the human average.
But does the brain actually expand into this 30% or so increased area, or would it just be empty space?
If the former, would it have an affect on cognition/intelligence?
SOURCE / FULL REPORT: https://web.archive.org/web/2015110...s-for-affected-brai-function-antp.1000107.pdfDiscussion and Conclusions
Since ACD is no longer popularly practiced only a theory can be generated about what implication these various ACD practices had on the individuals’ mental abilities and functions. Based on similar deforming conditions to the brain, like plagiocephaly, the results of these studies can help in understanding the circumstances of the past. Whether the pressures applied to these areas had harmful, beneficial, or insignificant influences can only be theoretically determined. A closer look at where pressure from the bands was applied on the various lobes of the brain, along with a fair, impartial consideration of the possible implications that occurred, sheds light on some interesting possibilities that ACD practices could have had on the individuals.
The practice of annular ACD would affect the frontal and occipital areas of the skull. Pressure to these areas would potentially affect the functions correlated with these areas in the lobes of the brain. Using information and experiences from the modern world that simulate similar states helps to form a hypothesis of whether the implications were harmful or beneficial. Damage to the frontal lobe that has been documented by doctors shows that impairment to memory, inattentiveness, inability to concentrate, behavior disorders, difficulty in learning new information, and motor aphasia take place. Documentation also shows that the pressure from the bands, from both tabular and/or annular ACD, in the occipital region may have influenced vision and ability to recognize objects. Pressure to temporal areas may induce damage that results in changes of worsening hearing ability, agitation, and irritability ...
In the cultures that practiced ACD, distant in both time and numerous other factors, it is possible that such deformations were of little significance to the society as a whole. However, it can generally be reasonably argued that most afterbirth deformational techniques do not improve functional outcomes of the tissues themselves. In a particular cultural or exposure setting however, one could argue that some advantage could be construed or obtained. The extent of these implications could have ranged from individuals due to duration and intensity of the pressure. An understanding of the full extent of the implications of ACD may never be met, but perhaps in the future more knowledge will be available through more research in the areas of craniosynostosis and plagiocephaly that could aid in this uncertainty.
Don't know enough about this so this is probably a daft question but here goes....This concluding section from a 2013 survey article summarizes the situation researchers face in addressing the issues ...
FROM:
O’Brien TG, Peters LR, Hines ME (2013)
Artificial Cranial Deformation: Potential Implications for Affected Brain Function.
Anthropol 1: 107.
doi: 10.4172/antp.1000107
SOURCE / FULL REPORT: https://web.archive.org/web/2015110...s-for-affected-brai-function-antp.1000107.pdf
Don't know enough about this so this is probably a daft question but here goes....
Wasn't disturbance to the temporal lobes also supposed to induce hallucinations as well as the other states mentioned? If they realised that some sort of injury or natural skull malformation produced this could it have been an attempt to replicate it?
Wouldn't they retain the abiity as adults? So could it be a way of producing a class of priests/shamans. That would assume it was only applied to a small or select group and wasn't widespread.What's the point in trying to induce hallucinations in infants / small children?
Interesting video, includes facial reconstructions:
Just to return to the video that @Mythopoeika posted.
The claim is that the elongated skulls found in Peru have mostly non-native-American DNA and can be traced back to the Black Sea region, specifically Crimea. ...
But is there any solid evidence that the peoples of Crimea and Peru are related and would this mean that ancient Europeans, who practised cranial deformation, made it to the Americas several centuries before the Vikings?