Archaeologists excavating in Croatia have found three ancient skeletons that resemble aliens. Two of them have artificially elongated skulls. 12,000 years ago in ancient China, Africa and South America, people deliberately distorted the shapes of the skulls of their children.
Most archaeologists associate this with the need to identify cultural origins and indicate social status. For these purposes, they used tightly knotted leather and fabrics, earth-filled hats in the form of bags or rigid wooden corsets. The skulls were given bizarre shapes. This was done at an age when the child's skull was more flexible.
In his article, Mario Novak, a bioarchaeologist at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb, Croatia, wrote that “three skeletons were found in a grave” at the Hermanov Croatian archaeological site in 2013. Then, between 2014 and 2017, DNA analysis and X-ray imaging were performed to view the interior of the elongated skulls.
Analysis of the remains revealed that three boys, ages 12 to 16, lived between 415 and 560 AD, all suffering from malnutrition. As for how they died, the team believes they were most likely struck by the plague, "which killed them quickly and left no marks on their bones." It is known that the boys lived during the Great Migration, a turbulent period in European history, when, after the fall of the Roman Empire, representatives of new cultures came to Europe with their own traditions.
After DNA analysis, the researchers determined that one of the representatives of the "ancient trio" was of Western European origin. He showed no signs of elongation of the skull. Another was of the East Asian type, and its skull had a "oblique deformation", which means elongation upward.
Oblique deformation. Skull of a boy, extended upwards.
The third boy had a Middle Eastern genesis and a "cranio-annular" deformity, in which the frontal bone was compacted, which significantly increased the height of the skull. The researchers wrote that it is not known to what cultural communities the owners of the skulls belonged, but one of the boys, a representative of East Asia, was most likely a Hun.
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This extreme type of skull lengthening reflected a person's social identity.
The study of the period of migration of European peoples, 4-7 centuries AD, shows that the practice of artificial skull modification was characteristic of nomadic peoples, namely the Huns from the Carpathian region. It was there that the largest number of such skulls was found during archaeological excavations. To date, more than 200 elongated skulls have been discovered.
Cranio-annular deformity.
The Huns have occupied this territory since the 5th century. From there they made sorties to different parts of Europe. In 453 A. D. Attila, the leader of the Huns, died suddenly, after which many Germanic tribes rebelled against the Huns and expelled them from the Carpathian region. The frequent occurrence of artificial skull deformities in Europe and the Carpathian Basin can be explained by the movement of the Huns, who occupied Europe in the 4th and 5th centuries, forcing the Germans to move west. The custom of creating elongated skulls persisted among German tribes until the early 7th century.
To understand why the Huns deformed their skulls, you can use the results of research and archaeological excavations carried out in South America. Elongated skulls for the ruling elite of these tribes were a sign of a special social status.
Bioarchaeologist Matthew Velasco of Cornell University noted that 300 years before the Inca empire swept over southwestern America, the social elite of the ancient Peruvian collagua tribe in southeastern Peru cultivated elongated skulls as a sign of high social status.
Pavel Romanutenko