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FACT: History is full of people with pointy heads (on purpose)
By Rachel Feltman
While examining remains found on the Baltic island of Gotland, which was once home to many wealthy viking settlements, researchers found an unusual instance of body modification: three women from 1,000 years ago with elongated, cone-shaped skulls. But this find wasn’t unusual for the reasons you might be thinking.
The practice of artificial cranial deformation has actually shown up loads of times throughout history, in lots of different parts of the world—on most continents, in fact. But on Gotland, it seems to have been a trend that stayed isolated to these three women (or maybe even just two—the paper notes that one of the skulls could reasonably be an example of a naturally kind-of-pointy head).
This is the first time vikings have been seen with purposefully elongated heads. The closest folks who were widely doing this at the time were over by the Black Sea, which might just be a hop skip and a jump today, but was too far for casual cultural crossover. Some graves from several hundred years earlier in Bavaria yielded 13 women with elongated skulls, but they were reportedly genetically distinct from their neighbors, and might have come from Romania or somewhere nearby, where cranial manipulation was common thanks to the Huns.
The biggest mystery…
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