Back in 2013, the world media spread sensational news: in the west of Mexico, near the village of Onavas in the state of Sonora, archaeologists found a mysterious cemetery, which is at least 1000 years old. The common grave contains the remains of 25 creatures "generally similar to people." But half of them have an excessively elongated skull in the back of the head. Just like the aliens from the famous movie "Alien" directed by Ridley Scott.
Sensational find
Scientists assure: in terms of mass, neither they nor their colleagues have ever seen anything like this in Mesoamerica - from Mexico to Honduras. Where did these mutants come from in an abandoned burial ground that belonged to the Pima Indians? Research project director Cristina Garcia Moreno puts forward her own hypothesis:
- Most likely, in the ancient Indian tribes, the skulls were deformed in order to be able to distinguish the representatives of the upper classes from the lower ones.
But this guess, as the journalist Svetlana Kuzina notes, leaves many other questions unanswered. Firstly, it is not clear why it was necessary to pull out the skulls to distinguish the leader from the servant, if all the corpses were buried in one burial ground?
Secondly, scientists did not find an explanation for the fact that some skeletons had decorations, while others did not. And why was there only one female out of 25 skeletons?
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Thirdly, it is not known why some "long-headed" ones had specially damaged teeth. Analysis showed that this execution was carried out during their lifetime, and in adolescence.
Other precedents
I must say that this find has become the second such find in the Western Hemisphere in recent years. Earlier, in November 2011, mummified remains of a humanoid creature with a huge head were discovered in Peru. They found it near the city of Andahuaililas, in the southern province of Kvispikachi, near the world famous Nazca plateau with its mysterious giant drawings. Upon seeing the find, Renato Davila Riquelme, an anthropologist at the Peruvian museum in Cuzco, exclaimed: "The spitting image of an alien!"
Skulls of various shapes from the National Archaeological Museum of Peru
The strange man really looks like an alien from a horror movie. The size of the head from chin to crown is 50 centimeters. The length of the torso and legs is approximately the same. The eye sockets are much wider than those of ordinary people.
The teeth are like those of an adult, and the crown of the head is not overgrown, like a baby's, fontanel. And most importantly: in both the Mexican and Peruvian skulls, the nape of the head is strongly extended back.
“Bigheads does not correspond to any ethnic group living on our planet,” says Riquelme.
However, such skulls are not so rare in South and Central America. At one time, researcher Robert Conolly, who collected materials about ancient civilizations, photographed a lot of them during his trips around the world. The skulls had very different types of deformations: elongated, with a brain volume of over 3000 cubic centimeters, spherical, of some complex shape. In 1995, Conolly published the results of his research on a separate CD-ROM, preferring electronic media to traditional paper. The work was named "The Search for Ancient Wisdom".
The Russian researcher Andrey Sklyarov also touched upon the topic of these skulls.
He was interested in the theory of the alien origin of the "long-headed", who found their last refuge on Earth. Science, meanwhile, repeats about sick people, burdened with severe hereditary mutations, as well as victims of operations on the "machining" of the head. Scientists even call the reasons for such operations: in addition to the desire to highlight the knowledge (as mentioned above), such may be the desire to communicate certain specific features to the blood circulation of the brain, to make the skull "more beautiful" or, conversely, to make the enemy fearful.
Skulls from the Old World
It is known that the first deformed skulls were found in Peru and described in the early 19th century. European scientists immediately attributed them to the many wonders of the New World. But in 1820, a skull with traces of artificial deformation was unexpectedly found in Austria. He fell into the possession of Count Breiner, who sent out casts of it to various museums in Europe under the name "Avar skull". The reason for this was the fact that the skull was found next to the fortification, which was attributed to the Avars. For some time, there was a popular version that this skull, after all, came from Peru and into the Old World by accident. However, a similar skull was found in quarries near Vienna in 1846. And seven years later, both finds were described as "Avar skulls". Later in Western Europe, new artificially deformed skulls were found, attributing them to the "Saracens", then to the "Huns",then the "Helvetians", then someone else from the barbarian tribes.
One of the daughters of Pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti
Such skulls were also found in Russia. But who, when and even where they were found, remains a mystery. It is only known that they appeared in the Kerch Archaeological Museum shortly after its opening in 1826. The head of the Kerch customs, Pavel Debrux, a native of the Duchy of Luxembourg, an educated man who had been fond of archeology all his life, pointed to their belonging to the ancient tribe of "macrocephalic" described by Hippocrates. In 1832 the visiting traveler Dubois de Montperet attributed them to the "Cimmerians". In 1867, two artificially deformed skulls were found near the mouth of the Don, and one more - in 1880 on the banks of the Volga near Samara.
The correct dating of these three finds allowed the outstanding ethnographer and anthropologist Dmitry Nikolaevich Anuchin, already in 1887, to suggest the spread of the custom of skull deformation from the Trans-Volga steppes to Europe. Later, this hypothesis was brilliantly confirmed.
Science testifies
To date, the number of such finds is in the tens, if not hundreds, and therefore academic science has a fairly detailed idea of artificially deformed turtles. There is reason to believe that the Neanderthals were still involved in artificial skull deformation.
In any case, such a Neanderthal skull, 50,000 years old, from the Shanidar cave in Iraqi Kurdistan has been described. Although this precedent is considered by some scientists to be accidental.
Scientists believe that the first reliable case of artificial skull deformation is a find from the Neolithic burials of the Australian state of New South Wales, whose age is determined as 13,000 years. Then artificial deformation became widespread in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Here the most ancient artificially deformed skulls belong to the Neolithic (Jericho, Choirokitia), Chalcolithic (Byblos, Sein-Hoyuk) and the Iron Age (Lachish). Found on the territory of Lebanon, Cyprus and Crete, such skulls date back to the 7th-2nd millennia BC. e. and are exclusively female. It is believed that the deformation was carried out as part of the cult of the mother goddess Astarte (Balaat), who personified motherhood and fertility.
Over time, this custom became widespread in Ancient Egypt. The cult of Astarte became widespread there since the XVIII dynasty (1550-1292 BC), and “alien” elongated heads had, for example, Pharaoh Akhenaten, his “beautiful” wife and sister Nefertiti and Pharaoh's daughter. In the other direction, a strange custom by about the 5th-3rd centuries BC. e. penetrates into Central Asia, and then is passed on to the warlike tribes of the Sarmatians - thus, who are sometimes identified with the Amazons.
There, the custom fell on extremely favorable soil: the heterogeneous ethnic composition of the tribes, the variability of their composition, the need to isolate and distinguish their own in the face of the growing danger of attack and absorption from the tribes of the Hunnic union contributed to the rapid spread of artificial deformation of the skull there. If in the Sarmatian burials of the 1st century BC. e. - 1st century AD e. 35.7% of skulls are artificially deformed, then in burials of the late Sarmatian stage (II-IV centuries) - already 88%. This allows us to consider artificial deformation as one of the most expressive and important features of the Late Sarmatian population of the Volga region.
So change the shape of the head in Africa
Caught up in the uncontrollable wave of the movement of the Huns, the Sarmatians (or Alans, as they were increasingly called by the name of one of the tribes) moved west. Wherever they did not appear in the era of the Great Nations Migration, terrifying enemies with their strange "tower-like" heads! Several times the Alans settled in Europe, trying to establish their own state, while fighting on the side of the Romans, then against them.
Finally, the Alans, still numbering several tens of thousands of people, together with the Vandals crossed over to Africa, where they founded their own kingdom on the territory of modern Tunisia. In 533-534, it suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Byzantine army.
The latest artificial skull deformations in Europe are found in France and Poland and date back to the 11th-13th centuries. Until recently, this custom was widespread among the Turkmens. For some peoples of the Malay Archipelago and Central Africa, the tradition, according to which a "tower-like" head is considered beautiful, has survived to this day.
So, once again, the aliens were innocent? After all, modern people also so want a miracle! But nevertheless, there is a possibility that the strange custom, the origins of which are lost in the darkness of millennia, nevertheless arose after our primitive ancestors saw "aliens" who struck them with their divine power from distant planets.
Author: V. Peipins