In the Volgograd region for many years, archaeologists have been digging up the skulls of mysterious creatures
The day before in Kabardino-Balkaria, in the necropolis above the village of Zayukovo, an archaeological expedition of the State Historical Museum discovered the skulls of mysterious "long-headed" people. The burials were left by the Sarmatians, they date back to the III-IV centuries AD. The find caused a sensation in the scientific world - according to archaeologists, such unnaturally elongated, oblong skulls are most often found in Egypt and Peru. However, Volgograd anthropologists see nothing outstanding in this - as it turned out, amazingly shaped skulls have been found in the region over the past 30 years.
They weren't people?
One of the two deformed elongated skulls found in the KBR belonged to a 16-year-old girl. Another has not yet been attributed, but, according to archaeologists, this is also the remains of a fairly young man. It is believed that this shape is the result of deliberate deformation, which was carried out with the help of tight bandages in early childhood.
Scientists have no consensus on the origin and purpose of elongated skulls. According to one version, this was done in order to cause an altered state of consciousness and "foresee" the future. The cost of such an operation was terrible headaches, insanity and often early death.
However, there is another version, absolutely fantastic. Several years ago, to reveal the veil of the "long-headed" mystery, scientists conducted a genetic analysis of five deformed skulls found in the Paracas Desert in Peru. At the same time, the geneticists were not told anything about the origin of the skulls to avoid bias in the analysis.
And the results were completely unexpected. It was found that the DNA of elongated skulls differs not only from human DNA, but also from the DNA of all humanoid creatures that existed in ancient times.
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- This mutation makes it possible to assume that we are dealing with a completely new humanoid creature, very far from Homo sapiens, Neanderthal or Denisovan man. I'm not even sure that they will find a place in the genealogical tree of modern man, - said then the employee of the genetic laboratory Brian Foster.
Foster explained that in creatures with such skulls, genetic differences from humans were very noticeable, so it would hardly be possible to cross between representatives of these two species. It is difficult to overestimate the consequences of this discovery.
Who were the mysterious creatures buried in Paracas? How did they look at the beginning of their evolutionary path? Or maybe they flew to Earth, already having a formed shape?
If we assume that this version is true, then extraordinary creatures many hundreds of years ago lived on the territory of our region.
Could communicate with the gods?
Archaeologist and local historian Vitaly Mamontov told Volgogradskaya Pravda that burials of people with deformed skulls were found in Kalachevsky, Oktyabrsky, Svetloyarsky districts.
“We came across amazing finds in Soviet times,” recalls Mamontov. - And if then we were guided by aliens, we would have been laughed at and deprived of scientific titles. I don’t believe in it now. The custom of pulling skulls existed among many ancient peoples, and in some African tribes it is practiced to this day. It has been established that this shape of the head is imparted from infancy by the action of tight bandages and even wooden devices. According to one version, in this way people were created who were predetermined to communicate with the gods.
“If we analyze the skulls found in the Volgograd region, then the most active“lengthening”was in the Middle Bronze Age,” continues Mamontov. - Then there was a temporary lull, and the process of deformation of the skull continued in the late Sarmatian times.
And here is what Hippocrates wrote about the "long-headed" ones in his work "On air, waters and localities."
“The original reason for the elongated head was custom. As soon as the child is born, while his bones are still soft, his uncured head is set with his hands and forced to grow in length by means of bandages and other suitable devices. Initially this was done according to custom, but over time it became part of nature."
Do not repeat the experiment
But the Volgograd anthropologist Evgeny Pererva, who devoted many scientific works to artificial deformation of the skull, categorically disagrees with this statement of the great physician.
- It is not inherited, - says the scientist. - The skull can change its shape only as a result of a disease - microcephaly, but not necessarily at the same time it acquires an elongated shape. All the findings that were made in the Volgograd region are artificial lengthening of the cranium. In our collection, material showing traces of artificial deformation of the Eneolithic-Bronze Age includes 47 skulls. As for the types and methods of deformation of the cranium in the Early and Middle Bronze Age, they are quite diverse.
Even the appearance of the Russian kokoshnik some researchers explain by the attempt of the Slavic tribes to imitate the shape of the heads of the nomadic Sarmatians. The collection of long-headed skulls is kept in the Museum of Anthropology of VolSU. According to one of them, in the laboratory of plastic anthropological reconstruction of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a reconstruction of a Sarmatian warrior was made, who, by all appearances, was a commander and was buried with special honors
- No one can argue that the shape of the head somehow affects the intellect, - thinks Evgeny Pererva. - And to say that an elongated skull guarantees some special qualities is even dangerous - there are many who want to repeat the experiment of the ancients.
One way or another, until now, none of their scientists dared to substantiate exactly why several generations of people lengthened the skulls of their children. Only one thing is clear: today the "long-headed" ones are the biggest mystery of world anthropology.
TOP-7 MOST AMAZING FINDINGS OF RUSSIAN ARCHEOLOGISTS
Archeology answers our questions about the past and sometimes, with some luck, provides some insight into the present and the future. However, it also happens that archaeologists pull out such secrets into the light of day, which are simply impossible to unravel. Here are seven of the most intriguing finds by Russian archaeologists.
1. Princess Ukok is a girl's mummy discovered in Altai in 1993. This find is still considered one of the most significant discoveries of Russian archeology at the end of the 20th century. The local population demands to bury the mummy, as they believe that it guarded the entrance to the underworld and ensured peace in the region.
2. Birch bark letters. Residents of Novgorod find them when laying communications, and a fragment of "Certificate No. 612" a native of Novgorod Chelnokov found in his own flower pot when transplanting flowers!
3. Gold of the Scythians. On the vast territory between the Danube and the Don there are many mounds. They remained here from the Scythian tribe, and each kurgan is "gold-bearing", because only the Scythians put so much gold in the burials of both nobility and ordinary people.
4. Unknown type of person. Amazing remains were found in Denisova Cave, located in the valley of the Anuy River in Altai. "Denisovsky man" turned out to be an extinct type of man, whose genome is significantly different from ours. The evolutionary divergence of such a man and a Neanderthal occurred about 640 thousand years ago.
5. White Sea labyrinths. There are labyrinths in all parts of the world among peoples at different stages of development. In Russia, the most famous ones are located near the White Sea: there are about 40 of them there. There is an assumption that the ancient people who lived by the sea believed that the soul of a deceased person was transported across the water to another island, and it should not return back. The labyrinth served this purpose: the soul wandered in it and returned back to the kingdom of the dead.
6. Blood of a mammoth. Not so long ago, in the ice of the Lyakhovsky Islands of the Novosibirsk archipelago, scientists discovered the carcass of a female mammoth, in which blood was preserved. Scientists from different countries have high hopes for this find. They hope to find a living cell of this animal and raise the question of cloning it.
7. Five underwater cities. In the area of the Kyrgyz lake Issyk-Kul, an international underwater archaeological expedition discovered at least five ancient cities, which are about 3 thousand years old.
Nadezhda Magnitskaya