The old Mayan and their traditions and values have always attracted the world. But this weird and bizarre tradition of skull binding is the most shocking tradition.
The deformation was done by distorting the normal growth of the skull of a child as small as a month old for six months. The tradition was performed to demonstrate social status.
The people with deformed elongated heads were believed to be more intelligent, of higher status, and closer to the spirits. The idea that the Australian skulls were artificially deformed was first suggested in the mid-1970s.
Over the last 40 years, the idea has gradually become the mainstream view. The deformation would have occurred when the skull’s owners were infants under 12 months in age.
Our skulls are soft during this period, and so parents or other adults can use boards, bandages, or regular head massaging to control its growth trajectory.
Artificial skull deformation is possible largely because of compromises deep in our evolutionary past. Humans, and some of our great ape relatives including the chimpanzee, have larger brains than we should for animals of our size.
Most of that brain growth occurs after humans and other apes are born and the initial growth spurt, in the first few years of life, is so rapid that young brains can grow faster than young bones.
Consequently, not all of the bones in the skull are fused together when we are born, to allow the brain to push them apart as it expands. Our skull does not begin to fuse into a single solid unit until we are at least a year old. In truth, we will never know precisely why some prehistoric Australians practiced skull modification.
However it is known that people from several other cultures in the more recent past also did so, and historical accounts of their motivations might provide clues.
Michael Obladen at Charité University Medicine Berlin, in Germany, has compiled some of these accounts. His works reveal the practice has generally been carried out as a means to improve the social prospects of infants.
In pre-Columbian America, for instance, head shaping helped elite members of society to define themselves: an elongated skull was seen as more beautiful and a sign of noble birth. The same thing applied in 19th century Nicaragua.
And for some of the Native American tribes including the Chinook and the Cowlitz in 19th century North America, a forehead that had been deliberately flattened like those of the Australian skulls was a mark of freedom while those with rounded foreheads were looked down on.
To nobility, beauty, and freedom we can add one more motive of some skull shapers. Even into the 20th century one tribe in Papua New Guinea modified their infants in the belief that it boosted the child’s intelligence.
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