Archaeologists Found a 6,200-Year-Old Skull. Then They Noticed Something Very Wrong.

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

The burial site Chega Sofla has many skeletons with elongated skulls, likely from a practice called cranial bandaging where people use wrapped fabric to permanently reshape the skull in infancy and early childhood.
Researchers discovered one skeleton with a cone-shaped skull that died from blunt force trauma.
The study used CT scans to analyze the thickness of the elongated skull and determine whether the severity of the injuries could be attributed to the cranial bandaging.

Much to your grandma’s dismay, your tattoos and piercings are types of body modifications, or procedures that deliberately alter the human body. Humans have experimented with these alterations for much of our existence. And while your “sick ink” may be widely accepted in the Western world, other cultures have body modification rituals that are much more extreme by our standards.

Cranial bandaging is the practice of wrapping strips of fabric around a child’s growing skull to permanently modify the shape. When performed over several years, cranial bandaging results in an elongated, cone-shaped head.

Many skeletons with these modified skulls have been found at Chega Sofla, a site in western Iran that dates all the way back to 4,700 B.C. The site features dozens of graves that range in size from single burials to entire family tombs. Researchers for the Zohreh Prehistoric Project have studied the area for more than a decade, and they recently discovered the remains of a woman with an elongated skull that was inexplicably bashed in. Published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology on May 22, the researchers’ new study details the traumatic head injury that killed the woman about 6,200 years ago.

“We know this woman experienced the fracture in the final moments of her life,” lead author of the study Mahdi Alirezazadeh told Live Science, “but we don’t have any direct evidence to say that someone intentionally struck her.”

Alirezazadeh and the other researcher on the study, Hamed Vahdati Nasab, used CT scans to get a closer look at the woman’s (referred to as BG1.12 in the study) skull. They focused on the thickness of her cranial bones and something called the diploë, or the spongy bone tissue found between the external and internal calvaria layers (think of diploë as the insulation in the walls of the skull).

Researchers found that BG1.12’s bones and their diploë were much thinner than that of a typical skull, although they noted that this is to be expected with cranial alterations. They explain that because of the thinness, the skull was likely much less effective at protecting the brain from external forces—like a blunt-force blow—than a normal skull would be.

The triangular fracture on BG1.12’s skull runs from the front to the left side of her head. According to the study, “an intense force delivered by an object with a wide edge impacted the skull of this young woman during her final moments.” Alirezazadeh explains that they can’t necessarily attribute the woman’s death to her modified skull because the trauma was so severe. He also noted that another fractured skull was found at the site, except it was unmodified.

“It should be noted that the blow was so severe that it would have fractured a normal, unmodified skull as well,” the researcher told Live Science. “So we cannot attribute cranial fractures solely to modified skulls,” he later continued.

At Chega Sofla, people with and without cranial modifications are buried together, so the woman’s skeleton has yet to be identified. Researchers are also still uncertain whether the woman sustained her injuries accidentally—or if she was murdered.

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