Book Review - The Enigma of Cranial Deformation
(Ref: The Enigma of Cranial Deformation: Elongated Skulls of the Ancients on Amazon but if you're actually interested in the topic you should buy The Bioarchaeology of Artificial Cranial Modifications: New Approaches to Head Shaping and its Meanings in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and Beyond instead. I warn you now that while the latter is several leagues better, it's also much narrower in scope, and neither is even remotely satisfying.)
Introduction
So here's what everyone seems to agree upon:
The elite castes of many ancient peoples used to employ bindings to shape the heads of their children, bonsai-kitten style, in a practice now known as Artificial Cranial Deformation (ACD). This might seem strange, but what's even stranger is that the practice is found in ostensibly-isolated peoples from all around the world without any apparent mechanism of transmission, going back around at least ten thousand years. Almost everywhere in fact; the only major areas without a history of it are Australia and South India, though it does seem to have been quite rare in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are even remains of Neanderthals which appear to have been subjected to ACD!
This would seem to raise several questions, including:
- How might the practice have spread around the world in an era without communication networks?
- Was it possibly multiply independently invented by all these various groups?
- Why would anyone invent this once; let alone repeatedly, everywhere?
- Does it confer some sort of cognitive advantage?
- Do we have any inkling of what its practitioners thought about it?
- Neanderthals did it? Really?
Hopefully we can all agree that it's an interesting topic. I'm generally fascinated by the interplay of skull magnitude and brain development and its implications for cognition. We know that cranial capacity varies among human populations in a way that seems to scale linearly with intelligence. I can't tell you how titillated I was to discover that Oprah apparently has a head so massive that when she needed a wig for a movie role, the producers had to stitch two normal ones together which sheds some light on her success. This is just one example of the kind of wild stuff one encounters when looking into brain/cranial/cognitive matters.
There are many reasons to think that cranial shape may also play a role in differential cognition among populations, but this avenue of inquiry has been verboten in the academy for at least decades, and Django Unchained somehow seems to have driven the final nail in re: popular consciousness, so very little is actually known.
Things get even more intriguing when we start to delve into historical head binding/ACD. Not only was it universally reserved for the elites, and forbidden to the lower classes, but cross-culturally there seems to have been near-unanimous sentiment that the procedure made for children who were more intelligent, wiser, and more spiritual; 'closer to the gods'. Supposing all these cultures did invent the practice independently, which is already kind of a hard swallow, what are the odds that they'd all independently, and erroneously, ascribe such significance?
The mental image of elite ancient humans around the world having discovered a forbidden process by which they could not only uncounterfeitably mark their children as socially superior but also actually increase their brain size and thereby intelligence (and, if you will, their access to the spirit world) is just too good to pass up. Not only would it make for an amazing story, and represent an under-appreciated aspect of human development, but it also tantalizes; suggesting that maybe, just maybe, there's a key to massively increasing human intelligence today, for our own children, and it's been right in front of our noses this whole time, inconceivably overlooked by our intellectual classes; a lost secret waiting to be rediscovered. [Point of order: I solemnly swear that I have no intention of trying this on my own or anyone else's children.]
Also, I know this sounds crazy (and that I've already got two strikes against me for looking into officially-designated bunk in the first place) but I have a sort of personal interest in the matter. For you see, my own birth was unusually traumatic and in the process I experienced extreme levels of cranial deformation. I've seen the pictures and they're... unforgettable. My dad told me that it wasn't until several minutes after I was born that anyone in the room was even convinced I had a face. After some time my skull ended up shaped close enough to normal that it's not noticeably aberrant except that it's very large; like Oprah, procuring suitable headgear can be a problem for me. Thankfully I also have a very large chest and shoulders so it doesn't for the most part stand out, but the point is that, while both of my parents are of above-average intelligence, I'm easily a couple standard deviations above either of them and have always sort of wondered why. Can you blame me for looking to cranial deformation as a possible insight?
Regrettably, after reading The Enigma of Cranial Deformation, doing a bunch of fact-checking, and compulsively looking into other sources, I still don't have any solid answers (except to the Neanderthal question which is that, no, they probably didn't actually practice it). The reason I don't have answers is because this is a preposterous book stuffed to the gills with random nonsense. Yet I can't shake the impression that its main point, which is that something weird is going on here and mainstream scholarship doesn't seem to take it seriously enough, does turn out to be more or less valid.
What bums me out about this state of affairs is that it's pretty much what I expected going in, and I'm disappointed to have my priors confirmed. Much time and effort was spent and almost nothing of value was gained.
But I did read it, and took notes, and I'm trying this thing where I reward myself for reading books and writing reviews. So, in case anyone anyone else cares, here you go.
(If you'd like to know where I am at on all the questions enumerated above, I do come back to that toward the end.)
But Why Read This Book?
Look, for all that The Enigma of Cranial Deformation: Elongated Skulls of the Ancients takes itself very seriously, it is clearly not a serious academic work and that's not hard to tell from the cover. Or the publisher. Or by flipping it open to almost any random passage and reading a few words. In fact, let me just...
While it is easy to see them [the Olmecs] as Proto-Mayans and Citizens of Olman (however large that country may have been), we should also consider them as the fantastic Proto-Mesoamericans they may have been: psychedelic aliens who used lasers to cut colossal basalt heads; Atlantean refugees who made a last stand in Tabasco; or Shang Chinese mercenaries taken from East Africa or Melanesia and specially trained to administer the Pacific (and later Atlantic) ports of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; or perhaps a people originally from the Atlantic side all along, having come from Africa, possibly as a military force from Egypt or West Africa circa 1500 BC. There are many possibilities. (pp. 57-58)
Golly that was a good one and I expect it will save me a lot of time in trying to describe the experience of reading this book. So, again, why did I do it in the first place?
Well, 'fun' isn't the right word, but it's not a bad start. These books aren't entertainment for me, exactly. Actually, this one is fairly typical in that it's poorly-written and worsely-edited; leans heavily upon long, dry passages ripped from e.g. wikipedia; often goes on interminable, barely-relevant tangents; repeats itself regularly at length and in more or less the exact same language; and despite constantly slinging mud at mainstream scholars rarely if ever does it raise coherent objections to their conclusions. It's tedious to read, is what I'm saying, and it would be fair to ask why any non-schizophrenic would bother. (Unless...?)
And yet I do love the genre. I have ever since wandering into a new age coffee shop at 14 years old and losing the day to their little library which treated such topics as the dinosaur-infested hollow earth, breakaway Atlantean nazi moon bases, and the scandalous tantric sexual customs formerly practiced on the sunken continent of Lemuria. The authors often put enormous amounts of work into these books. If there's a real-life connection to be made between their crazy theories and actual scholarship you can bet they'll find it. It's fascinating to see their minds at work and, at their best, with just a bit of effort, it's possible to suspend one's own disbelief for a little while; long enough to get a glimpse of alternate histories and realities of such scope, complexity, and grandiosity to put even the greatest sci-fi to shame.
Like A Princess of Mars, part of the joy is the conceit that it's all real; that the little red dot one sees wandering across the night sky really is an exotic alien world called by its inhabitants Barsoom, and that if you manage to fall down the right hole in the middle of nowhere you might go there too. Unlike Burroughs, though, these authors seem to be entirely earnest. And that adds just a little something extra which, for me at least, takes it over the top. A sci-fi author understands the reader's suspension of disbelief to be implicitly granted; the author of HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy knows that he must always be at pains to help the reader justify its continued extension.
Still, reading actual sci-fi would be a lot less work. But actual sci-fi wouldn't have the added perk of legitimately substantially increasing one's real-life knowledge of history, geography, archaeology, and so on, in an academic capacity. The vast majority of the content in this book is solid, believe it or not, and the bibliography is thorough. Almost all the really crazy stuff is phrased in terms of questions or what-ifs, as in the passage quoted above. And this means that, as one reads more and more such books, repeatedly returning to the same hobbyhorse contentions of the genre, focusing as they do on perceived gaps and deficiencies in mainstream scholarship, one inevitably begins to make one's own novel connections. And one will inevitably learn a whole lot of truths that mainstream sources would never touch upon for fear of looking disreputable. Like about cranial capacity, and Oprah.
So this is what I was truly doing reading this book. There was a topic -- ACD -- that I wanted to know more about, and I knew that if there were some really cool but potentially-inflammatory things to know about it, a book like this would be the only place to find them. The authors do actually put a fair amount of effort into footnotes and the bibliography, and when in doubt it usually isn't hard to jot down an astonishing claim and verify it elsewhere.
As I mentioned earlier, the book was a bit of a letdown in that respect. Turns out there's just not actually much to be said on the subject, other than totally-correctly calling attention to how neglected the topic, and its possible implications, tend to be in mainstream scholarship. But even more than usual for such a book, The Enigma of Cranial Deformation introduced me to a bunch of (real) new concepts, in this case mainly related to Central and South American prehistory, and above all reignited the flame of my wonder for the ancient world and what may indeed, plausibly, have been.
Plus it was actually pretty fun after all. So in that spirit I'm still calling it a win.
The Book Itself
Chapter 1, Mysterious Elongated Skulls of the Ancients, bemuses the reader at the door by opening with a reference to the SNL routine/1993 feature film Coneheads. I can only imagine that this was intended to set people at ease by relating to something familiar, but it's wildly inappropriate for a book which otherwise insists upon itself as being of supreme credibility. And then, just to reinforce the point (no pun intended), it devotes most of the next page to a large print of the Coneheads movie poster, neatly labeled as such in case anyone weren't certain.
After that it spends a few pages on a fairly tight overview of ACD, though borrowing heavily from wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. It helpfully distinguishes between dolichocephaloids, that is elongated skulls, and brachycephaloids, which is rounded skulls. Evidently the former sort of ACD is typical of Caucasian skeletons and the latter of Asiatic skeletons, but both types are found in all sorts of places, including Mesoamerica.
We're treated to a range of possible explanations including,
- These people were a whole distinct branch of genus Homo and their heads were naturally that way genetically. This is based mainly upon a single reference from an 1851 work describing a mummified fetus whose head allegedly grew that way on its own, now lost to science;
- The 'Atlantis Theory', basically that a race of head-binding supermen spanned the globe in prehistory, enlightening natives everywhere, who then copied the practice in a sort of cargo-cultism;
- The 'Nephilim-Watchers Theory', tied to the Hindu Ramayana, which indicates that demi-angelic human hybrids operated essentially as described in the Atlantis theory above, sans Atlantis;
- The 'Nephilim-Extraterrestrial Theory', which is the same as the previous one but aliens instead of angels; and
- The Mainstream Theory, which isn't actually a theory at all so much as a very brief recap of the established facts with which I opened this book review.
These theories are mainly just mentioned for now rather than being fleshed out, and (other than the mainstream) will be regularly called back to throughout the rest of the book.
Then we get nine pages, which is about half the entire chapter, on the tangentially-related subject of trepanning. One gets the impression that the authors just wanted to talk about trepanning more than that they actually thought its inclusion was justified in terms of bolstering their theses, which are themselves also left to the reader's imagination.
One minor note here: The authors claim that ACD is unknown in Oceania, but later blow this absolutely conclusively out of the water in chapter 6. As I said, the editing is abysmal.
Chapter 2, Evolution, Ancient Man, and the Cranium is a brief recap of the history of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, as well as an overview of the then-current 'Out of Africa' model of human expansion, buttressed by some alternative scenarios involving sunken continents. It was around this point that I started to wonder how much of what I was reading was vital context for some impending brilliant hypothesis, and how much was just filler. (In retrospect, it was definitely mainly the latter.)
Chapter 3, Cranial Deformation and the Olmecs is a longer chapter which has a lot to do with the history of archaeology in Mesoamerica, and the Olmecs in particular, but relatively little time spent on ACD. One interesting point is that Olmec art was replete with images of human beings who, at a glance, look decidedly Chinese or Egyptian based on style of dress, and facial features including beards. A couple fairly convincing examples are included. The chapter ends with a whole bunch of super cool photographs of Olmec figurines, directly related to head binding, but with almost zero explanation or additional information.
(Here, at roughly its mid-point, the book takes a break for a pretty good color photo section which reproduces many of the black and white photos spread throughout.)
Chapter 4, Cranial Deformation in South America is much more consistent in relating its content to the subject of head-binding but still rambles quite a bit about ancillary topics and mainly seems interested in grousing about how many ACD-related artifacts are in storage in obscure museums instead of displayed to the public or available to amateur researchers. Coincidence? Not if you ask the authors, though they don't ever quite seem to get around to offering suggestions as to who's hiding the truth or why. But I should mention that this section did have a lot of really cool, if ultimately irrelevant, information about the prehistory of Peru etc.
Chapter 5, Egyptian, African and European Cranial Deformation initially frustrated me by lumping all these areas together when I'd have been much happier with a full chapter on each. And, upon reading it, there is very little information about any of the above. This is where I started questioning the authors' mental stability, as they seem to have a hard time staying on topic or even conceiving of what a thorough survey would look like. Instead we're treated to a lot of borrowed passages about certain specific topics, including multiple pages on the possible racial background of Nefertiti specifically, the so-called 'Serpent-Priests' of Malta, and the general nature of Huns. This entire chapter is like eighteen pages and took me about ten minutes to read. My disappointment was great, since this is the chapter to which I had most been looking forward.
However it did have a whole lot of very cool, if extremely random, tidbits gleaned from across vast swathes of history. The stuff about Nefertiti and the Mitanni was mainly a wash, but if half of what they say about ancient Malta is true I want to find a book just about that, and apparently there was a brief resurgence in the popularity of headbinding in 19th-century France in response to the widespread phrenology craze current at the time. Also some pretty good photos including some of real-life ACD-recipients from 1930s Central Africa.
(This is as good a place as any to mention that while this book fails entirely at its main purpose and is generally an embarrassment to even be caught with, it is very easy reading and entirely suitable as a casual curiosity when one is taken by the right mood.)
Chapter 6: Cranial Deformation In Asia and Pacific Islands is an extremely cursory survey of some ancient ACD-related folklore including about the Taoist Immortals, who are often portrayed with elongated heads. In this chapter I also discovered that in some parts of ancient proto-Korea possibly most of the population practiced forehead-flattening, based on skeletal evidence and surviving contemporary accounts. One cool aside is that head-binding and elongation is still practiced to this day in Vanuatu, contradicting the author's own initial assertion that Oceania is one of the only places with no tradition of the practice(?). But the upshot here is that as a result there is actual video of headbinding in action! Though the book does not suggest where it may be found.
Then we jump, for some reason, to the Pacific Northwest, where it turns out that the 'Flathead Indians'... were that.
Chapter 7: The Nefilim, the Watchers, and Elongated Heads is awesome. There's not much new information about ACD, but here the authors finally take off the kid gloves and go whole-hog on outrageously fantastical propositions regarding what may explain the phenomenon of ACD. Mainly these track the theories initially established in Chapter 1, but with all kinds of additional colorful details.
The main gist seems to be that there was some kind of race of human, angel/ET, or hybrid of all of the above that looked more or less like we do except taller and with elongated skulls. These creatures map to the biblical Nephilim, 'giants'; beings of great strength and wisdom and beauty and prowess; heroes of old; who established kingdoms everywhere, uplifted the local human strains to something like modern levels of intelligence, and then vanished for unknown reasons though not without some interbreeding. We also get Atlantis, the lost planet of Nibiru, and the Anunnaki thrown in, plus a lot more vague implications that the truth is being hidden by all archaeological institutions everywhere for unspecified purposes.
This chapter has to be read to be appreciated, but it was extremely up my alley and very much worth the price of admission to the book, even if I could very easily have started with it and skipped the enormous amount of ultimately irrelevant information that constitutes the majority of the preceding chapters.
Unfortunately, having finished, I've found none of the sort of alt-science that I was looking for and am only closer to answering my initial questions by dint of having had a while to think them over while wading through whatever this was.
Verdict: buy it if it sounds like your cup of tea and don't bother reading straight through; it should make for a lovely diversion on some rainy day when the power has gone out. At least you know what you're signing up for.
Where I'm Left Re: Artificial Cranial Deformation
Here we dismiss The Enigma of Cranial Deformation entirely because as should be clear by now it doesn't have any place in adult conversation.
(It's late and I'm tired so allow me to ramble out my current understanding if you will.)
I have, of course, read a whole lot of other material on this subject, including a bunch of mainstream academic work and some pop-level synopses on various websites and so on. The mainstream consensus, as I understand it, is as follows (my portrayal, not an actual quote):
ACD became popular all over the place for the simple reason that it allowed upper classes to distinguish themselves from lower classes and had the advantage of requiring only some sticks and twine to accomplish, thus making it available pretty much everywhere.
Contrary to what the layman would expect, ACD cannot possibly confer any cognitive advantage because it does not actually increase cranial capacity -- it just looks like it would -- and even if it did we have no reason to believe that bigger cranial capacity would result in bigger brains.
Skull shape per se also has zero effect on cognitive development or patterns, which we know because different people groups have different skull structures and WE CAN SURELY ALL AGREE that this has not resulted in any innate cognitive differences among groups.
Furthermore, it is only natural that societal elites the world over, having reserved the practice for their own children, and having already justified their class status by supposing themselves intellectually/spiritually superior to their subject populations, would conflate the two, thus tying a neat little bow on the question of why they all thought the procedure made people smarter and more divine.
The matter is settled and anyone who shows too much interest in looking further into it should expect the same sort of treatment they'd receive if they started asking questions about other settled science, e.g. the nonexistent heredity of cognitive traits, or the equally-nonexistent innate psychological differences between men and women.
Yeah I'm editorializing heavily here but I'm also trying to wrap this up. So here are my thoughts.
A whole lot of materially-trivial body modification procedures, including piercings, tattoos, hairstyles, and even circumcision (etc. etc.) would seem to be able to serve about as well for arbitrarily signifying membership in elite social castes. And to be sure, those and others have all been used that way in various times and places. But the valence of each of those other practices varied from culture to culture, and nothing else has anywhere near the same consistency of association with the socio-cognitive elite. It's not at all clear why ACD should be such a conspicuous exception.
It could be argued that one key advantage of ACD as an arbitrary status marker is that it can only be achieved in infancy. This prevents up-and-comers from weaseling their way into high status later in life. But there are other such procedures, and none has ever been nearly so popular across time and race. The neck-coilers of Myanmar, for example, or foot binding in China. Actually, when you get right down to it, there's no shortage of methods by which elite children can be uncounterfeitably marked as such. Simply ban the practice among the proles and execute the entire family of anyone caught in the process. Easy peasy. So again, why this one? Besides which, as far as I can tell, most cultures didn't bother in the first place because simply having the speech, mannerisms, and bearing of nobility was a good-enough shibboleth to satisfy the demand.
Whereas, if children's heads can be shaped to increase cranial capacity, and this does result in greater brain volume, the picture starts to make perfect sense.
Regarding the assertion that ACD does not actually increase cranial volume, but only appears to, I think I need to call BS.
As I understand the situation, it's true that ACD-processed skulls are not uniformly possessed of greater cranial capacity. The standard mainstream academic line is that while they might look bigger, this is because humans are bad at comparing the relative volumes of spheroids (very true) and in fact ACD doesn't have any significant impact on cranial capacity at all! (The stock ACD-scholar metaphor here is that you can take a ball of clay and elongate it by stretching but you still have the same amount of clay).
That sounds really good, but I have several problems with it.
For one, I have personally seen elongated skulls that were measured to have much greater cranial capacity than modern averages; sometimes as much as circa 50% more. (They're commonly encountered when tooling around certain museums in the Yucatán.) So I know for a fact that the procedure can substantially increase cranial capacity. When challenged, mainstream scholars will admit that, okay, yeah, that can happen, but the procedure as practiced in other specimens can actually reduce cranial volume, and in most surveys of ACD skeletons there really is almost no change to total cranial capacity compared to contemporary population averages (where available).
But to me this only suggests that some versions of the practice are more effective than others, which is so obvious that it bothers me to have to point it out. It also fits in well with cargo-culting and drift over time as the general impression of the practice is aped without preserving the vital finer points which (maybe) result in bigger craniums and (maybe) bigger brains.
More to the point, having dug as far into this question as is practical for someone who after all does have a job (and other hobbies at that), I'm pretty certain that the overwhelming majority of ACD skeletons lie in storage without ever having been measured; let alone against 'contemporary population averages', which are usually not even available for comparison, and where they are at all the sample sizes are typically paltry and often not even clearly contemporary. Frankly, I think we just don't know. What I do know is that institutional bias in this field runs very strongly and all in one direction, and so I remain gleefully skeptical.
Besides which, all else being equal, I'd expect elites to have bigger skulls and brains for reasons of nutrition if not necessarily also sheer genetics. It would be pretty crazy if they didn't, yeah? So if elites have bigger skulls, and elites are also practicing ACD, how can it be the case that ACD isn't correlated with bigger skulls?
Now, when it comes to whether artificially goosing a baby's skull into larger cranial volume even results in larger adult brain volume, I have to admit that I don't know, but I don't think anyone else does either. Wish I had more to tell you, but I don't except that I don't buy the default denials of the 'experts' for more or less the same reasons as above.
As to whether cranial shape affects the cognitive tendencies of the brain which grew inside it, aka 'phrenology', it probably doesn't need to be said that anyone who knows anything is keeping their mouths shut tight about it and that isn't likely to change any time soon. Great work, Tarantino. =/
In Summary
I don't ultimately have any respectable grounds on which to argue that ACD worked, or works, or that it's worth attempting on some kind of trial basis just in case. Sure the possibility is tantalizing, and part of me hopes that somebody gives it a shot, but only in the morbid way that I also want to see a bunch of five year olds deposited on an island and left to develop in isolation (which is to say, I don't.)
But I do notice that the authors of books like The Enigma of Cranial Deformation actually have at least one leg to stand on when they rail against the close-mindedness and general ignorance of the authorities on the subject. Too much of this maps too well onto too many similar 'settled' controversies in the science of human cognition. I suppose I hardly need to belabor this point.
So here's my final tally:
- How might ACD have spread around the world in an era without communication networks? - I still have no idea.
- Was it possibly multiply independently invented by all these various groups? - That strikes me as absurdly implausible but I'm at a loss as to alternatives.
- Why would anyone invent this once; let alone repeatedly, everywhere? - Because it works, maybe, but I really don't know.
- Does it confer some sort of cognitive advantage? - I'd bet about ten thousand US dollars that it can, but not much more.
- Do we have any inkling of what its practitioners thought about it? - Less than I'd like but where we do have that information it's extremely consistent.
- Neanderthals did it? Really? - No. I didn't have time to get into this but the Neanderthal specimens almost certainly got their skulls warped in other ways, most likely after death. They are very old and things just shift around that way.
All in all, artificial cranial deformation is just an unbelievably fascinating subject that I expect to go to my grave still buzzing with curiosity about. Sadly, rather than any grand conspiracy, this is probably just because for purely historically-incidental reasons looking into the matter has become coded as low-status.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
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Notes -
If we're going to be technical about it, we still do cranial deformation too.
I haven't done a complete survey but bloodletting was practiced on every inhabited continent. Circumcision was of course practiced in the ancient world, but also in Oceania, Australia, North America, among the Ainu, and probably Mesoamerica at the very least.
That reminds me of another ancient surgical practice - trepanation. People were drilling or abrading holes in their skulls in neolithic Europe, in the Andes, in China, and in Mesoamerica. Could they all have been wrong about the benefits of having a hole in your head?
I guess I have to agree, but what's special about doing it for intelligence? All these somewhat retarded practices (circumcision, trepanation, bloodletting, cranial deformation) were done to acquire some kind of positive benefit. Nevertheless, we shouldn't uncritically believe that the benefit is real.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
"ACD doesn't (in expectation) increase cranial capacity" and "ACD can increase cranial capacity in some cases" are not actually mutually exclusive.
Not to mention that your evidence for the second claim is the existence of at least a few large deformed skulls, but clearly that isn't actually evidence that ACD causally increases cranial capacity, so it's not clear that there even could be a conflict here.
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