At Houtaomuga, in China, 11 of 25 skeletons dating to between around 12,000 and 5,000 years ago feature skulls with artificially elongated braincases and flattened bones at the front and back.
     Permanent reshaping of a skull early in life, when cranial bones are soft, can be achieved by compressing an infant's head with one's hands, binding the head with hard surfaces, or tightly wrapping the head in cloth, and may have been signs of social status.
     Oddly shaped, intentionally modified skulls have been found in many parts of the world. The earliest skulls with generally accepted signs of cranial modification date to between around 13,000 and 10,000 years ago in western Asia, southeastern Australia and now, East Asia. In the Americas, this practice appears more than 8,000 years ago.
     Houtaomuga was excavated from 2011 to 2015. A man's skeleton with a modified skull was found in a tomb dating to between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dating of the skeleton placed it at around 12,000 years old. Two sediment layers dating to between 6,300 and 5,000 years old contained 10 skeletons with reshaped skulls. Of five adult modified skulls, four came from men and one from a woman.
     Signs of skull reshaping as a practice reserved for high-status individuals or certain families appear at the site. A 3-year-old child with a reshaped braincase was buried with large amounts of pottery and other artifacts, suggesting the youngster came from a rich family. Numerous shell ornaments placed on a woman with an elongated skull likely denoted her high status. And an adult and adolescent with modified skulls were buried together, suggesting that the two may have come from the same family.
     While those individuals clearly had modified skulls, the oldest Houtaomuga skull displays a slightly elongated braincase which - according to one researcher - characterizes some Asians today and probably wasn't intentionally modified. However another scientist argues that the extent of bone flattening exceeds any naturally occurring variations in skull shape, which often include a slight depression near the back, as on the 12,000-year-old skull.

Edited from ScienceNews (3 July 2019)