People in many cultures in world history have changed the shape of their heads by deforming the skull from an early age. The parts of the skull were often pressed together so that they rose upwards. This practice is attested in the cultures of central and southeastern Europe in the centuries after Christ, or in pre-Columbian civilizations in America such as the Maya and Inca civilizations. For the Japanese Hirota culture, this custom was not yet secured—but now experts working with anthropologist Noriko Seguchi of Kyushu University have been able to use scans to prove that these people, who lived between the third and seventh centuries, also deformed their heads. They flattened the posterior skull, like Seguchi and her colleagues In PLOS ONE Magazine to report.
The skeletal remains the team of scientists studied came from a tomb at Hirota, a site on Tanegashima Island in southern Japan. For comparison, the research group also surveyed the skull shapes and contours of the dead from other southern Japanese sites in the first millennium BC. BC, so from Doigahama and Kyushu. They wanted to know if the flat backs of Hirota’s heads were actually caused on purpose or if they arose accidentally, for example because people were strapped to the boards of cradles as small children.
But as it turned out, Hirota’s skulls are always distinctly flat and almost square in shape at the back of the skull, at the occipital bone and adjacent parietal bone. Some parts also show damage, brittle areas, or so-called worm bones. These are pieces of bone that have grown into the sutures of the skull. Something similar is known from human remains from Central and South American cultures: deformities can cause bones to become brittle or even dead in places. Seguchi and her team suspect that the abnormalities in Hirota’s skulls may also have resulted from intentional deformation in childhood.
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