A prehistoric skull discovered half a century ago in an Italian cave is the oldest example of artificial cranial modification ever discovered in Europe, new research reveals. The unusually long skull, which is about 12,500 years old, confirms that this practice dates back to at least the Stone Age.
“Body modification — including cranial shaping — was one of many strategies used by past societies to construct and communicate identity, status, and belonging,” study co-author Irene Dori, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Florence, told Live Science in an email.
In the new study, published July 30 in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers analyzed a skull from Arene Candide Cave, a Late Upper Paleolithic site on the northwestern coast of Italy. Between about 12,900 and 11,600 years ago, generations of hunter-gatherers used the cave to bury their dead. In the 1940s, archaeologists found dozens of human skeletons at the site, and most had been rearranged after death in an ancient ritual. One particular skull of an adult male, called AC12, was discovered in a niche on top of another burial.
In the 1980s, researchers suggested that the long, narrow skull of AC12 may have been the result of a disease or accident that altered the growth of the skull when the man was a child.
But Dori and colleagues were intrigued by another potential explanation: artificial cranial modification. For the new research, they virtually reconstructed the skull and statistically demonstrated that the best explanation for the “oddly shaped head” of AC12 was childhood body modification, they wrote in the study.
The practice of artificial cranial modification involves applying pressure to an infant’s head during growth and development. When done consistently for months or years, this results in a permanent reshaping of the person’s skull. It is unclear whether the practice would have affected the person’s brain function.
The AC12 skull had been reconstructed and glued together in the 1970s, so the researchers had to take it apart to properly measure the skull fragments. They opted to do this nondestructively by performing CT scans of the skull and virtually separating the bones. Then, the researchers digitally reconstructed AC12 in four ways and used a technique called geometric morphometrics, which quantifies the biological shape of a bone, to compare the virtual reconstructions to skulls from around the world.
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Latest from Live Science…