The puzzle of why diverse ancient people, even on remote Pacific Islands, would use head-binding to create elongated heads is mystifying, this cultural practice may be traced back to mysterious ancestors with very complex genetics origins.
Image credit: Marcia K Moore.
Marcia K Moore works with Brien Forester and reconstructs these beings.
On the coast of Peru a mysterious people appeared about 3000 years ago and disappeared 1000 years later. Today we know of them as the Paracas, an Inca term to describe the area some 1500 years after the Paracas were no longer present.
Cranial deformation of human skulls was a phenomenon that existed on all inhabited continents, and especially the case about 2000 years ago among the elite of societies.
In general these were the elites of a society and cranial deformation was performed on new borns in order to make them look distinct from the general population. In Peru and Bolivia there were many societies with elongated heads, including the royal Inca family.
Were they some sort of elite race that roamed the entire planet? Why do anthropologists rarely talk about cranial deformation and know so little about it?
But now recent DNA testing of the early Paracas indicate that they did not originate in Peru and that they were in fact not Homo sapiens.
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