I discuss this hypothesis in more detail in The Looming Collapse Of The Artificial Cranial Deformation Paradigm. The evidence of elongated skulls present in fetuses and children had lead Rivero and Tschudi, Bellamy, Graves and others to a hypothesis that these skulls belonged to an extinct race of people, who left their legacy on the populations who succeeded them as a practice of artificial cranial deformation. Basire from Bellamy's article (1842) and Mark Laplume's artistic reconstructions He indicated substantial structural differences from those of “normal” infant skulls and the absence of the signs of artificial pressure, as well as their similarity to other “Titicacan” skulls in the Museum of the College of Surgeons in London. Bellamy provided a detailed description of these skulls in 1842, suggesting that they belonged to two infants – male and female, few months and about a year old respectively.
Two elongated infant skulls, which Rivero and Tschudi mention in Peruvian Antiquities were discovered and brought to England by Captain Blankley and presented to the Museum of the Devon and Cornwall Natural History Society in 1838. The skulls of “Ancient Peruvians” were also in Samuel Morton’s collection in Philadelphia. Mark Laplume’s reconstruction of the Rivero and Tschudi’s foetus The Elongated Skulls of InfantsĮlongated skulls of infants were available to European researchers as early as 1838. The same proof is to be found in another mummy which exists in the museum of Lima, under the direction of Don M. We present the reader with a drawing of this conclusive and interesting proof in opposition to the advocates of mechanical action as the sole and exclusive cause of the phrenological form of the Peruvian race. It belongs, according to a very clearly defined formation of the cranium, to the tribe of the Huancas. Professor D’Outrepont, of great Celebrity in the department of obstetrics, has assured us that the fetus is one of seven months’ age. Leopoldo Mueller from the Spanish 1851 Edition of Peruvian Antiquities More still: the same formation of the head presents itself in children yet unborn and of this truth we have had convincing proof in the sight of a foetus, enclosed in the womb of a mummy of a pregnant woman, which we found in a cave of Huichay, two leagues from Tarma, and which is, at this moment, in our collection. “We ourselves have observed the same fact in many mummies of children of tender age, who, although they had cloths about them, were yet without any vestige or appearance of pressure of the cranium. The Story Of Elongated Skulls And The Denied History Of Ancient People: An Interview With Mark Laplume.In other words, the hypothesis fails to take into account the skulls of infants and, most importantly, foetuses which had similar elongated skull shape. Rivero and Tschudi in Peruvian Antiquities (1851 Spanish, 1853 English) argue that the protagonists of the artificial cranial deformation hypothesis are mistaken, since they had only considered the skulls of adults. Do we have such evidence? Yes, we do! Moreover, this evidence has been known to the academic community for over 163 years! evidence that such skulls already had an elongated shape in utero, before any head-binding was possible. What evidence could challenge this paradigm? Right – the existence of fetuses with elongated skulls, i.e. In other words, ALL elongated skulls are merely deformed ‘normal’ skulls similar to those of modern humans.Įlongated Skull from Crimea and other parts of the worlds, Baer 1860 Challenging the Paradigm The main idea behind the head-binding paradigm is that ALL elongated skulls are a result of intentional modification of the form of the skull by applying external pressure. This paradigm emerged in the first half of the 19th century as a way of explaining unusual skulls discovered in Europe and South America, in places such as Crimea and Peru respectively. Elongated skulls are usually explained in terms of head-binding or artificial cranial deformation.
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