Elongated skull from Silla culture unearthed in Korea
Mitochondrial DNA analysis and facial reconstruction gave the answers
The “cone-headed” skull of a woman’s remains found in Korea has puzzled archaeologists.
The remains of a woman with a bizarre elongated skull, which is between 1000 and 2000 years old, have been unearthed in Korea. The woman’s head appears to be far longer than would be normally expected.
Unlike some of the deformed, pointy skulls that have been found throughout the world in other ancient graves, however, it is unlikely that this woman had her head deliberately flattened, the researchers said, as the skull did not have flat bones at the front of which are distinctive in deliberately deformed skulls.
How do researchers explain the long skull
The team was able to reconstruct her facial features and head shape based on skull fragments. It turned out that the woman was suffering from a medical condition: Dolichocephaly (derived from the ancient Greek, δολιχός meaning long), a condition where the head is longer than would be expected, relative to its width.
In humans it means that head width is less than 75 per cent of head length.
It has an incidence of one in every 4,200 people, and can be present in cases of Sensenbrenner syndrome, Crouzon syndrome, Sotos syndrome, as well as Marfan syndrome.
Although dolichocephaly may be associated with some abnormalities, alone it is just a normal variation and treatment is not essential.
My Thoughts:
"The team was able to reconstruct her facial features and head shape based on skull fragments. It turned out that the woman was suffering from a medical condition: Dolichocephaly (derived from the ancient Greek, δολιχός meaning long), a condition where the head is longer than would be expected, relative to its width."
Non-PC Translation:
The Korean woman with a Dolichocephalic skull had a Dolichocephalic skull.
archaeology.wiki
"In humans it means that head width is less than 75 per cent of head length. It has an incidence of one in every 4,200 people, and can be present in cases of Sensenbrenner syndrome, Crouzon syndrome, Sotos syndrome, as well as Marfan syndrome."
Non-PC Translation:
It has an incidence of one in every 4,200 people worldwide, but occurs more often in some ethnic groups than others, and can also be present where recessive genes are expressed or when certain genes are introduced into populations that have previously had little or no exposure to them.
archaeology.wiki
"Although dolichocephaly may be associated with some abnormalities, alone it is just a normal variation and treatment is not essential."
Non-PC Translation:
It's perfectly normal among certain blood lines.
Conclusion:
Every person living today is a hybrid of homo sapien sapiens and one or more subspecies of archaic human, and none of the archaic humans were any better than the others.
That is why their genes survived.
That is why all of the homo sapien sapiens who did not have introgressed genes did not survive.
That is why the genome of the anatomically modern homo sapien Mungo Man, of mtDNA haplogroup LM3, did not survive. And there were probably many other genomic populations of AMHS who went extinct in the upper paleolithic and neolithic, too.
Only the hybrids survived, and they and evolutionary process have selected which genes from which subspecies would be retained over the past 10,000 to 70,000 years.
Scientist have detected introgression from at least four "unknown" archaic species in addition to Neanderthal and "Denisovan."
The only populations of modern human left who might not have archaic introgression are the Andaman Islanders and certain uncontacted tribes in Papua New Guinea and the Amazon... but I would bet good money that additional introgressed genes from "unknown" subspecies of hominid will be detected in their populations in future studies.
