basic archaeological knowledge to the rescue! (again)

[rivendellrose]

One of the neat things about the Flipboard app on iPad is that it makes a quick scan through news and other happenings online veeeery easy. This morning, while I was drinking my tea and going through my usual mix of New Scientist, assorted news feeds and various lifestyle blogs (where I found this lemon cake that I am now dying to try to make for Thanksgiving, but sort of afraid I am not sufficiently baker-skilled to manage), I found something (else) very interesting: it was a picture of some really beautifully-preserved mummies that had, in life, been subjected to skull flattening.

What's skull-flattening? I'm glad you asked, imaginary reader!

You see, our modern cultures around the world today aren't the first Human cultures to get the idea that something unnatural (like, say, over-inflated lips or silicon filled breats) are attractive. Most cultures throughout history seem to have practiced some kind of body alteration for the purpose of beauty, basically based on the idea that if you're spending a bunch of time and energy doing (x) to your body (or your kid's body), you must have enough resources not to be worrying about whether or not you're going to eat today. Body modification, whether it's scarring, foot-binding, or, in this case, strapping boards to your infant's head to flatten and elongate his or her skull while it's still soft, is a great way to advertize that you don't have to spend your time working. In other words, it's like having really absurdly long fake nails, high heels, absurdly exaggerated musculature, or a perfect tan even in winter. It's a sign that says "I'm so successful I can waste my energy on stuff that doesn't make sense from a pure survival standpoint!"

Think of it like the Human equivalent of a peacock tail. It's a shitty idea as far as avoiding predators, but the people around you (particularly the lady peacocks) think it's damned impressive, and from an evolutionary standpoint, that's what matters.

So, hey, this is exciting! I've seen illustrations of people with flattened foreheads, and I've seen a few dull pictures of the skulls, but I'd never seen anything so nicely preserved. I got very excited. ...And then I noticed the headline next to the photo.

"Scientists think this triangular skull belongs to an alien"

Um, what? No... no, not if they've ever so much as flipped through a basic archaeology textbook, they don't. Especially not since the skulls were found in Peru. Guess what region notably picked skull-flattening out of the bazillion body-modification options available to pre-industrial humanity? Peru. I even looked it up for you, to prove it - a quick Google search for "peru skull-flattening" gets you this Wikipedia article on artificial cranial deformation, which is the technical term for this kind of body mod. Down under "Reasons" you'll see a great little diagram of the methods the Mayans used, and next to the "History" section are a pair of skulls pictured underneath an 18th century painting of a Chinookan child undergoing the process, being held by a woman on whom the adult result can be seen. The top skull is labeled as Incan. Where did the Inca live, ladies and gentlemen? Peru. Relevant quote:

Artificial cranial deformation, head flattening, or head binding is a form of permanent body alteration in which the skull of a human being is intentionally deformed. It is done by distorting the normal growth of a child's skull by applying force. Flat shapes, elongated ones (produced by binding between two pieces of wood), rounded ones (binding in cloth) and conical ones are among those chosen.

Take another look at that Inca skull. Now look at the 'alien' mummies. I think I'll rest my case.

I shall refrain from commenting on the probable credentials of those Russian and Spanish "doctors" who think these things are from outer space, except to say that there's no law anywhere saying a total crackpot nutjob can't have a PhD in something. Io9 has an article about the same thing. I like to think they're being more than a little tongue-in-cheek about it, which makes me happy, but they're not quite clear enough about the "wtf, no" as I might prefer.

Comments

[empresspatti.livejournal.com]

This sent me into a research funtivity all afternoon. THANKS!

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Hooray! Glad to hear you enjoyed.

[mimerki.livejournal.com]

I shall refrain from commenting on the probable credentials of those Russian and Spanish "doctors" who think these things are from outer space, except to say that there's no law anywhere saying a total crackpot nutjob can't have a PhD in something.

Or of a reporter who took a light-hearted comment (e.g., "when I first saw them, I thought 'OMG aliens!'") entirely out of context, or asked a leading question ("they look like aliens, don't they?" "yeah, I guess they do.") to make an overblown headline.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Or of a reporter who took a light-hearted comment (e.g., "when I first saw them, I thought 'OMG aliens!'") entirely out of context, or asked a leading question ("they look like aliens, don't they?" "yeah, I guess they do.") to make an overblown headline.

Yeah, this story is far from showing up in bastions of good reporting. ;)

[diea.livejournal.com]

I have heard of this practice actually! I watch the history channel too much. I have heard that some people (crazy wacko people) have a theory that the skull-flattening was a way of honoring the god-aliens by making the children resemble them. Really though, this 'ancient aliens' crap needs to stop somewhere.

[diea.livejournal.com]

Also that cake looks amazing, but I'm not sure I could pull it off either. Let me know, if you try, how it turns out!

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

It's actually an upside-down cake, so I'm crossing my fingers that'll up the simplicity quotient somewhat. Not too sure about a recipe that calls for actual vanilla bean, though, and I'm still pretty awkward with food processors...

[diea.livejournal.com]

I wish I had a food processor! But I'm sure you could just use a mixer if you're more comfortable with that. And vanilla extract!

I like how the recipe says to 'confidently' flip it over.

I tell you though, if I saw it at a bakery, I would buy a piece!

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Hmm, y'know, now that I think about it, what we have is a blender. It's more or less the same thing... right? o_O

Vanilla extract may indeed be the answer to the whole bean thing. I am not above using extracts.

...Yeah, the "confidently" part is so not going to happen. It'll be more like "panicking and praying to whatever pops into my head at that moment." *Shudders* I can cook. It's baking I have a less than stellar history with... Maybe I'd be better off sticking with pies.

[ursula]

Yeah, I am rather skeptical of this idea that you can put a bunch of caramel in the bottom of a pan and just flip it out. Even a nonstick pan. I would be strongly tempted to line the pan with parchment paper or aluminum foil.

[diea.livejournal.com]

Parchment is a very good idea.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Yay! It's a very neat little practice - nothing I'd want to do, but a very interesting and inventive one, at least!

I have heard that some people (crazy wacko people) have a theory that the skull-flattening was a way of honoring the god-aliens by making the children resemble them. Really though, this 'ancient aliens' crap needs to stop somewhere.

Yeah, and all the medieval paintings of angels are based on aliens, too. *sigh* There's definitely some interesting and somewhat inexplicable stuff out there, but most of it... not so much. Sadly, the conspiracy wonks will take any little thing and run with it.

[seachanges.livejournal.com]

Late to the party, but this is pretty much exactly what I was gonna say. I suspect we've watched the same mockumentaries (I refuse to call them documentaries, since they're nothing more than sensationalistic garbage from the nutball fringe) on History.

The whole 'ancient aliens' thing is just intelligent design by another name. Instead of god, it's aliens! Plus, there's this whole nasty undercurrent of racism to it. Oh, the proponents never come right out and say "It had to be aliens because ancient tribes of brown people could never, ever have invented this stuff on their own," but it's implied real hard.

[diea.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I can't watch too much of those shows. I tend to start mocking them and then having to resist throwing things at the screen.

It makes me a little sick that these theories are given any acknowledgement at all. I honestly hope that the majority of people watching them are mocking them mercilessly, but even a minority taking them seriously is depressing.

I mean, I love Stargate, but I'm pretty sure the pyramids were tombs built by humans.

[seachanges.livejournal.com]

I used to use them for verbal target practice because they were fun to MST3K, but that was before History started making them the backbone of their lineup.

Half the reason why so many people take them seriously is because they're presented in a serious manner. If it's a news article, you may get a one line sentence saying not all scientists/academics in that field agree. If it's a TV show, it will be presented as a viable theory without any indication at all that it is, in fact, pure unadulterated garbage that no serious academic would touch with a ten meter barge pole.

(Why, yes, this is a hot button of mine that makes me want to start stabbing things with my trowel, however did you guess? *g*)

Stargate rocks, but even McKay would call these people idiots. *g*

[kusanivy.livejournal.com]

I'm very much with you on that. History Television here in Canada (our equivalent of the American History Channel) has started showing that "Ancient Aliens" show as well (sometimes as day-long marathons!) and it's driving me nuts for exactly the reasons you mentioned.

If they were showing it on Space (which is our SF station) it would be entirely different. As pure made up fantasy it would be perfect on a channel that is devoted to science fiction. But History is supposed to be for documentaries about REAL stuff.

They also show "William Shatner's Weird or What" and "Decoded" but that's different since those are specifically debunking shows which, although they outline the crazy theories, then make sure to show how there is a rational explanation behind the strange phenomenon.

"Ancient Aliens" doesn't do that and as such as no place on an actual science or history channel.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

As pure made up fantasy it would be perfect on a channel that is devoted to science fiction. But History is supposed to be for documentaries about REAL stuff.

This. I don't mind a bit if this stuff is presented as science fiction or fantasy - it makes great science fiction or fantasy! It's like the thing with the damned art-making murderous huge krakens a few weeks ago - if that guy had written a novel about his idea, I'd be all over it. But no, he had to go present it at a geological conference and make me die of embarrassment-by-proxy and worry that people are actually going to believe this nonsense rather than looking into the real stuff that's so much more interesting and exciting. Bler!

[kusanivy.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid I used to watch those Erik Von Dannikan, Chariot Of The Gods type shows and think "Well it's not true, but it would have been cool if aliens visited" because to my 12 year old mind the idea of spaceships was much more exciting than a bunch of ancient Egyptians pushing big blocks across the desert.

However as I've grown older and gotten a better appreciation for the crazy engineering involved - not to mention some of the "modern" inventions that ancient civilizations had (the Romans with their indoor plumbing, the Aztecs had crazy-awesome floating gardens, and the Greeks had vending machines!) it's the alien explanation that's the boring one!

The fact that stuff like the invention of steam power, electricity, computers, robotics etc could in fact be thousands of years old (and NOT because it was "gifted" to us by "superior beings" but because human beings are clever like that) is SO COOL!

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Heeee, I used to watch and read all that stuff, too. It seemed so exciting at that age! But then, as you said, you start really looking at the kind of amazing stuff people actually did thousands of years ago, and... wow. I mean, left to my own devices on a desert island or whatever, I know for damned sure I wouldn't be able to come up with more than a teeny little fraction of the basic stuff Humanity's been doing for millions of years, let alone something as fancy as stuff the Greeks and Egyptians and Inca considered common-place.

Also, I had to go look up the ancient Greek vending machine, and damn is that impressive! Along with every other thing listed in this Wiki article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_technology). Wow.

[kusanivy.livejournal.com]

Well, in theory, there isn't any reason they shouldn't have been able to come up with some of this stuff since a Cro-Magnon brain and a modern human brain are, physically speaking, the same (and thus there is no difference between an ancient Greek brain and a modern 21st century brain either)

So essentially it's always been an issue of "software" rather than "hardware". Since Cro-Magnon times we've had the "hardware" but I think human society through the ages forms certain parameters as far as "software" by developing a certain cultural world view, social norms, etc. which sometimes limits the thinking beyond that.
(Although I'm not saying the ancient peoples had developed quantum mechanics or that modern humanity hasn't discovered anything new)

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

There's no reason at all to assume they wouldn't - what fascinates and galls me is that despite assumptions to the contrary, I don't think most modern people would be able to so much as reconstruct even the tiniest bit of the stuff our ancestors did, if we were stuck in a situation where we needed to. A lot of people seem to assume that because ancient people did it, it must've been easy - as if a group of stranded people could just knock any two rocks together and instantly have fire, and shortly thereafter a perfect Clovis point and a three-room shelter made out of bamboo. I'm exaggerating, of course, but... it seems like a lot of people don't quite grasp that what puts us ahead of our ancestors isn't growth or evolution per se, but simply the accumulation of thousands of years of culture and technology that means we don't have to figure this crap out on our own. We stand on the shoulders of everyone behind us, and if we fell... damn but it would take a long time for us to get up again, I think.

Tl;dr, sorry. I just have to rant sometimes, because I don't feel like people in general properly appreciate the amount of amazing achievements that got us to where we are, and the fragility of all that.

[kusanivy.livejournal.com]

Oh no, I didn't mean to imply that any of this stuff was easy - it still takes great skill and brain power.

Did you see the "I Am Caveman" special that Morgan Spurlock did on Discovery a month or so ago? Where he and 11 other people went out into the woods and had to live for 10 days with only Neolithic tools and equipment?
They discovered right away that just getting the absolute basics together was damn hard work. They all were near starvation for days and 2 members quit before the experiment was over - the one woman after nearly having a nervous breakdown and a guy out of sheer frustration. They all came out saying that modern civilization had NO idea how "easy" it had it, and severely doubting that many modern people would survive if they ended up in that sort of situation for real.
(I've never tried to "rough it" that badly but the last few times I've gone backwoods camping and either grossly overburdened myself or had to struggle with something like cooking over a fire - because I thought it would be "fun" - makes me agree with them. It's NEVER as easy as it might look!)

And speaking of standing on the shoulders of others - look at my beloved Leonardo Da Vinci. Contrary to popular belief most of his amazing ideas and inventions did not come about in a vacuum. He was a voracious reader (at a time when books were not easy to come by) and a lot of time he extrapolated based on the tech of the time or tech he'd read about in older texts.
(Mind you when he extrapolated, holy crap he EXTRAPOLATED)

His true genius was in his insane curiosity, his absolute drive to explain everything around him, which allowed him to see connections that few other people had noticed before.

Oops... wrong Leo

[kusanivy.livejournal.com]

I meant to use my Da Vinci icon for that last bit - I really did...

Re: Oops... wrong Leo

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Suuuuuure you did. ;)

Re: Oops... wrong Leo

[kusanivy.livejournal.com]

Hey it was an easy mistake - they're both awesome ;)

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Oh no, I didn't mean to imply that any of this stuff was easy - it still takes great skill and brain power.

Gah, I know you didn't. I was afraid I'd come off as saying something other than that, that was all. Oy, communication. Also not as easy as we think it is... ;)

That "I am Caveman" show sounds fantastically fun, and I'm not surprised at all that everybody was flipping out and quitting early and all. All that supposedly primitive stuff is hard! As you said, I've never done more than camping or playing around with a few things, but... dang. Even watching a video of flint-knapping or something is a huge eye-opener, particularly once you realize that it only looks as relatively easy as it does because whoever's doing it has been practicing for years.

Ah, Leonardo. The best in the world at digging through crazy old documents and finding ideas that nobody else would even look twice at, then trying to build them something that might do something out of them. He was freaking brilliant. We had the Codex Leicester at the art museum here in Seattle just after Bill Gates bought it ('96 or so, I think?), and looking at all the sketches of water movement in it was just plain fascinating. That kind of curiosity and drive and connections you were talking about - absolutely amazing.

[kusanivy.livejournal.com]

Ok - insanely jealous now re: Codex Leicester
(although I did find a really cool CD-Rom at the library that contains a full reproduction & translation of the Codex... but it's not the same :P)

I am absolutely KICKING myself that I didn't go visit the Victoria & Albert Museum while I was in London last Jan (especially since I was visiting the Natural History Museum next door). I didn't know/realize at the time that they have one of Leonardo's other notebooks on display there XP
(I blame the guidebooks, which said squat about it in their write up on the V&A. If I'd done the write-ups that would have been the very first thing I listed! In BIG BOLD LETTERS!)

But yeah - he was frellin' brilliant.

[katherineokelly.livejournal.com]

Great commentary. I LOL'd.

And I must say, I'm not a huge history buff or anything, but I would instantly recognize a flattened skull as a historical fashion statement. How can scientists/historians who specialize in this stuff miss something so obvious? It's like finding human remains in China and thinking a certain ethnicity of Chinese had freakishly small feet naturally. ~_~

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I was able to bring the lulz. ;)

I know! I'm thinking these so-called 'scientists' are probably pretty low-level, assuming they have anything better than degrees in something totally unrelated, because... dude. Obvious-land called, and they want to have a chat about conclusions that shouldn't be made...