When hearing about tribes indigenous with modified skulls and other very peculiar body parts, have you ever wondered what led these people to perform body modification procedures?
A team of anthropologists, biologists and archaeologists from the universities of Kyushu and Montana, in the USA, carry out a discovery that shed more light on these intentional anatomical alterations produced by ancient peoples.
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As a result, researchers were able to come up with new theories about the motivation behind the practice. Changing physical characteristics was very common among ancient civilizations. The motivation is still uncertain, but it is believed that it was to differentiate himself from the others.
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More details about the new find
(Photo: The Kyushu University Museum/Reproduction)
According to the new study carried out by the aforementioned group of scholars, a
population indigenous people in Japan lived with modified skulls for 400 years.According to research, such a civilization made changes to deliberately deform the skulls of its children.
The study was published directly in the journal PLOS ONE, in which the team reveals that the people known as Hirota also performed such a procedure. The studied civilization lived in the south of the Japanese island of Tanegashima between the 3rd and 8th centuries.
the modified skulls
“A site in Japan that has long been associated with cranial deformation is the Hirota site on the Japanese island of Tanegashima, prefecture of Kagoshima," said Noriko Seguchi, study leader at the University of Kagoshima's Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies. Kyushu.
Still according to information released by the researchers, the skulls were modified with the use of strings or similar instruments to exert pressure on the skull.
This was done in children and young people so that, as the body grew, it acquired the desired contours in the pressured areas.
Conclusion on studies to date
Even with advances in research on the skulls, the site does not provide enough information to determine the origin of the people who lived there.
Therefore, it is not possible to state whether the practice was something cultural in the region and occurred spontaneously or whether it was carried out in an authoritarian manner, imposed by some leadership.
To continue the analyses, the group of scholars used different 2D and 3D recreation techniques on the skulls. However, so far, there are still no 100% conclusive results.
