Cranial Anomalies: Analysis and Hypotheses
Human anatomy and anthropology catalogs, as well as the field of frontier archaeology, describe bones, especially cranial bones, that significantly differ from the standard. For some of these anomalies, references are made to the vast pathology of the human skeleton, while others are attributed to the practice of ritual deformation, such as the binding of geishas' feet in Japan, or the ritual wrapping of infants' skulls to encourage development according to aesthetic and religious standards relative to a model that has not yet been precisely defined but is surely associated with a large, elongated or dolichocephalic skull.
This latter practice seems widespread in many parts of the Earth, even in very distant locations, and I believe there is a certain risk in the substantial deformation of an infant's skull through so-called ritual bandaging.
My objection arises from observing that it is necessary both to apply significant external pressure on the bone segment to achieve deformation and to maintain it for a long period, likely years.
We all know the delicacy of a baby's skin, even more so that of a newborn; such pressures applied to the scalp to deform the underlying bone would, consequently, cause a chronic local ischemic state of the skin with the onset of a bedsore-like lesion.
These types of injuries would have been very risky for the life of the newborn as they could cause local infection and affect delicate nearby structures, such as the brain or the meninges, difficult to resolve due to the likely unavailability of antibiotics to treat the infection itself.
To make such a theory plausible, one would have to hypothesize that this type of practice involved sacrificing the health of a certain number of children to achieve a few with significantly elongated heads.
For this reason, I believe that such a practice was not very widespread and I am also reasonably inclined to hypothesize the existence, in the past, of a rare type of man who had a more elongated and capacious skull than his Homo sapiens contemporaries.
The skull shown in the first image is immediately noticeable for its very elongated shape and larger dimensions than a normal human skull.
Another anomaly is the apparent absence of the sagittal cranial suture. This phenomenon could be associated with various types of cranial bone pathology, particularly scaphocephaly. In the schematic table on the following page, one can see a normal skull, with its bones and sutures indicated, and skulls that show some pathologies.
There remains a doubt about the apparent anatomical harmony of the findings, and I believe that a more careful analysis of these skulls could be useful to indicate the origin of such anomalies.
Closer to the possibility of another type of man are the findings from Merida and Ica with the discovery of some decidedly anomalous skulls expertly studied by Professors Robert Connolly and Lumir Janku.
These findings have been and are the subject of a fierce scientific dispute and show skulls anomalous for their shape and the volumetric capacity of the cranial box.
Some researchers hypothesize that the morphology of these skulls is related to the famous ritual bandaging.
Personally, I tend to reject this hypothesis; ritual bandaging, if successful, results in deformation of the skull in some of its dimensions, yet maintains the ratio between them in relation to the volume of the cranial box. In short, ritual bandaging deforms the skull but does not increase its volumetric capacity.
These skulls could house brains up to 2000 ml and over, belonging to mature, healthy individuals who became adults and died of apparently natural causes.
Using the powerful tools offered by current photo retouching and morphing software, I have performed a reconstruction of the facial features and head of one of these specimens of man who likely greatly influenced the aesthetic concept of antiquity with regard to the appearance of the human face.
The experiment was performed by altering the shape of a sapiens head according to the cranial proportions of one of the specimens in question, depicted in the lower left of the figure. The result obtained is very interesting.
It features large eyes, a result of the greater breadth of the orbital foramen of those skulls, a receding forehead that extends into a longer nose, a more prominent chin due to the presence of a more developed jaw, and so forth. Everything has been precisely related to the morphology of the skulls in question.
The ensemble is extraordinarily harmonious, and such a creature, unless it presented green and scaly skin, would certainly be considered beautiful or at least interesting even today.
Thoughts go to the heads of princesses from the "Amarna" period of ancient Egyptian history.
But even more interesting is the iconographic comparison with the features of Pharaoh Akhenaten of the 18th Dynasty.
In these, it seems certainly permissible to recognize the features of the electronic model created based on the dimensions of the Peruvian skulls displayed in the figure of this article.
The same receding forehead, the same elongated and more voluminous skull than usual.
Akhenaten was the grandfather of Tutankhamun, and in him, it is possible to recognize these somatic traits, although much mitigated, in some stone representations. What did these formidable men hide under their sumptuous tiaras?
Men who subverted the religious order of the time, changing the capital's location, recognizing and imposing monotheism.
Did they perhaps hide an anomalous skull? And why does the classic iconography of ancient Egypt show kings and priests with these headpieces that likely mimicked an anomalous skull as a sign of royalty or superiority of caste or priesthood?
And why did women make up their eyes, elongating and enlarging their shape?
A limited and necessarily superficial comparative analysis, conducted by me, with the common human skull morphology and the morphology of Tutankhamun's skull has revealed some plausible anomalies.
- It is not possible to definitively highlight the presence of the Sella Turcica, which in a normal human is an anatomical entity on the internal surface of the skull, a kind of niche guessed at in the bones of the facial mass that serves to contain the pituitary gland and probably to protect it from trauma.
In human pathology, such a phenomenon involves a malformative origin or the presence of a pituitary tumor that, as it progressively enlarges in this space, erodes its walls until their disappearance. This is a sure radiological sign of pituitary neoplasia.
In Tutankhamun's skull, this anomaly is quite visible, and it would be interesting to verify whether this aspect has been reported in scientific literature. The most common pituitary tumor is the adenoma, which is a benign tumor generally associated with severe hormonal dysfunctions that include Acromegaly, which involves, among other things, an elongation of flat bones and their thickening like the hypertrophic jaw or the thickening of the bones of the cranial vault. In this X-ray, such anomalies are not evident and leave the field open to hypotheses.
Another anomaly found in this X-ray is an accentuated dolichocephaly, an elongated skull in the anteroposterior direction, without a reduction of the remaining cranial dimensions. The consequence is an increase in cranial volume up to 1600-1750 ml compared to the 1300-1400 ml of a normal human skull. Excluding for reasons of space, but referring the subject to a possible second article, the existence of skulls or complete skeletons that suggest an even more mysterious origin, I would conclude with some personal considerations.
- It is possible that in the past two types of men coexisted on Earth, the Homo Sapiens Sapiens and the macrocephalic man.
- To the macrocephalic man was attributed a superior and probably benevolent nature, venerated and reproduced in somatic traits, through clothing and ritual deformation of the skull in those subjects who most represented authority and the sacred.
- Even currently, in the highest hierarchies, it is customary to wear headgear that mimics this anatomical aspect as if to continue the association between benevolent authority and spiritual guidance and the presence of a large and elongated head.
- It is possible that these ancient and extinct beings were the last of a great and culturally advanced race, a race characterized by a high moral sense that drove them to govern and advise, until their end, the primitive humanity of those times and, in this perspective, to direct it towards progress.
- It might be plausible that the possibility of crossbreeding these beings with Sapiens, as a consequence, led to a rarefaction of the most conspicuous somatic traits of their face over generations, with a purely Mendelian genetic mechanism.
The field of hypotheses remains open regarding their origin and the events that led them to inhabit our planet, to decline, and to go extinct in the very distant past belonging to the first kingdom of the shemsu hor or the mythical time of Tubalkhain, Thoth-Hermes, or ...
