Parents Have Been Reshaping Their Kids’ Skulls for 45,000 Years
Parents Have Been Reshaping Their Kids’ Skulls for 45,000 Years
A new find in Patagonia adds to the list of possible reasons for such extreme cranial modification
By Marissa Fessenden
smithsonian.com
November 20, 2015 8:00AM
For thousands of years, various communities around the world have bound cloth or pieces of wood to the pliable heads of infants to artificially elongate or otherwise shape their craniums. Neanderthals living 45,000 years ago show the evidence of such skull shaping, and the practice persists among some societies today.
While human adults have hard heads, babies’ skulls are still quite soft when they are born, thanks to gaps between the bones of the head. Cranial pliability arises from the need to squeeze such a large braincase through the birth canal. The spaces between bones also help human brains (along with those of our close relatives, chimps and other apes) have space to grow after birth, faster than bones can. Because of this physiology, if parents let their baby rest in the same position during their first months, a flattened spot might form, though this doesn’t affect the baby’s growing and developing brain.
It’s exactly that kind of accident that may have sparked intentional cranial deformation in cultures spanning Central America to Europe to Asia.
For example, some Native Americans put their children in protective cradles sporting flat boards around the head, so they didn't have to worry about the baby. At first, deformation could have been unintentional, explains archeologist Mercedes Okumura of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. After some time, people realized that this process caused babies' heads to flatten and, liking the results, they began to use the wood cradle in order to get an intentionally deformed skull, she tells Melissa Hogenboom for BBC.com.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/parents-have-been-reshaping-their-kids-skulls-45000-years-180957343/#W7O1btPwsFIEKMvU.99
