What Do You Think Of The Long-skull Fossils?

[lvysaur]

https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2017/01/paracas_elongated_skulls_fb.jpg?resize=865,452&quality=65

Skeptic sites chalk this up to "skull binding". But you can tell that there's a difference between the cone shape of a bound skull (like on the left) and a legitimately larger braincase (like on the right).

 

[boris]

I saw them in Paracas in the small museum that is dedicated to them. Higly interesting.

It seems that the folks who were doing the head clamp to get the shape, were trying to immitate the big skulls.

 

[S-VV]

Aliens. Either alien skulls, alien-human hybrids, or humans trying to imitate their (alien) creators.

Or maybe its precolombines being precolombines. The Aztecs believed that the tears of sacrificial children would bring an abundance of rain and therefore good harvest. The sheer cruelty and inhumanness of precolombines is seldom recognised.

 

[lvysaur]

The Aztecs believed that the tears of sacrificial children would bring an abundance of rain and therefore good harvest. The sheer cruelty and inhumanness of precolombines is seldom recognised.

Seems standard for Homo sapiens. The British just 150 years ago were tearing bulls apart alive, muscle by muscle, until they died, with some towns even having laws mandating that all meat must be harvested in that way. That's where "pit bulls" came from, and why they have that signature "bite grasp and wiggle" behavior.

As for imitators, they're not just imitators, some of them have legitimately huge cranial capacities, while others show the cone shape that an imitation would have.

 

[boris]

@lvysaur Brien Foerster talks about them a lot. Do you know his videos? He did DNA tests on many of them and showed that only a small amount of the paracas skulls are even of native american descent. Most seem to be more related to the other elongated skulls found around the black sea and Russia area.

 

[lvysaur]

Brien Foerster talks about them a lot. Do you know his videos?

I do, and they don't inspire very much confidence. My impression is that the skulls are privately owned by him and perhaps a few other people, and he promotes some "Incan tours" service connected to his museum. The "Paracas History Museum" is a privately owned company, and all the testing he cites was privately funded--there is even a gofundme of it still up. His evidence seems to focus on three things

1) reddish hair
2) mtDNA haplogroups
3) blood types

Starting with 1): it's well known that melanin can oxidize under certain conditions, meaning that hair color of a mummy is not always indicative of the true color during life. Here is a gallery of naturally preserved modern Europeans, all from 2000 years ago, who would have had very similar pigmentation to moderns. Note the paucity of any dark hair, and the bright unnatural blonde of one of them.

It reminds me of the Ramses red hair debate, except that in Ramses' case the hair was obviously much lighter in appearance, and his geographic proximity to northwest Africa/Europe makes the idea of someone with light hair far more plausible. That said, neither the Egyptian nor the Peruvian hair samples have been verified to rule out possibilities like hair dye.

The samples from Paracas look like dark brown/black hair with very slight lightening due to millennia of aging. Hair also naturally gets thinner over time when it is removed from a living body, so his claim of "think hair being European" does not mean anything either. I even have a few of my own hair samples from years ago, when I was worried about balding, and they feel much thinner than my current hair.

And even in the case that the reddish hair is legitimate, that does not inherently prove European ancestry. Light hair occurs in various Pacific populations, including the Melanesians, Papuans, Aeta, Australian Natives, Hmong, and many Indian Adivasis (untouchables). These people have zero European related ancestry, and the mutations that cause the light hair are completely different from those in modern Europeans. In addition, modern European light hair itself likely migrated in from northeast Siberia, via the ANE meta-ethnicity, (Ancient North Eurasian) represented by Mal'ta boy/Afontova Gora ancient fossils. The Afontova Gora fossil presents the earliest known evidence of lighter hair, and all the later European foragers who displayed light hair genes had ANE related mixture. The ones that did not (known as WHG, short for "western hunter gatherer"), displayed dark hair, but light eyes (as well as dark skin). In contrast, the various South Pacific people have zero ANE ancestry, but ANE itself exhibits some portion of Papuan or Indian related ancestry, suggesting that it originated in the southeast of Asia.

2) The Mitochondrial DNA. He claims that 3 of the Paracas mummies have the following mtDNA: U2e1, U2e, and H1. If this is true, it is ABSOLUTELY HUGE. However, there's zero publicly-available academic work that actually verifies this. If it is not true, then there are two possibilities: 1) he is intentionally lying to make money off of a false but enticing narrative, or 2) he hired a low-quality group to sequence the DNA, and it was contaminated with the DNA of living scientists (who would almost definitely be of modern Euro descent)

As for Y DNA, he makes zero claims about it. However in his video, he mistakenly claims that "nuclear DNA" is "the father's DNA". I don't know if that's him misspeaking, or him not knowing how genetics work.

3) He claims that because of the lower prevalence of O blood types, and high prevalence of A blood types, that the Paracas were not of Native American descent. However, blood type A was present in modern North American Natives, and the idea that the Paracas was descended from a Northern American population before a decline in type A isn't that farfetched. Of course, this is assuming that his claims about the blood types are even true to begin with, because he hasn't released any sort of academic documentation.

There is definitely something strange about the Paracas skulls, but the fact that it's being held privately, with all supposed scientific testing funded and kept private as well, is highly suspicious to say the very least. I wish some well known archaeogenetics group would test it.

 

[lvysaur]

It reminds me a lot of Anzick man, who was claimed to be a "lost Aryan Solutrean" or some other such nonsense, because of his "caucasoid" facial appearance (conveniently ignoring similar features on known Native Americans). When it was finally tested, it was found to be genetically 100% modern Native American, with standard Y and mtDNA haplogroups.

There is ancestry related to Indians, Siberians, and Europeans in all Native Americans (as well as in all modern Europeans to a lesser extent) because of Mal'ta Boy and the ANE population.

However this ancestry is well documented and present in all modern native American groups from just before colonization.

If you want a real fantastical theory with actual evidence behind it, I recommend reading this: Genetic evidence for two founding populations of the Americas

 

[boris]

Interesting, thanks.

Although I have to say I appreciate Brien Foersters „incan tours“ apart from the cheesy design of his marketing materials. Everyone has bills to pay. He doesn’t make fantastical claims in them, but looks for pointers of their real age and points to possible cataclismic events that could have happened around the time.
Standard tourguides will all tell you the fairytale of the incans having built the megalithic sites even though there is no actual proof of it.

 

[boris]

Newborn baby elongated skull