Deliberately Deformed Skulls Were Potent Symbols of Social Power
ARCHAEOLOGY In a number of villages on the Danube in Southern Germany, archaeologists have discovered sensational skeletons of women with deformed skulls. The shape is due to the fact that the women's skulls were bound in childhood.
Scientists from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, have found an explanation of the discoveries. Via DNA studies, they determined that the women had dark hair and brown eyes, which was not normal in Southern Germany around 500 AD, when the women lived. They were all discovered side by side with other skeletons without deformed skulls, which belonged to people with light hair and blue eyes. The DNA of those skeletons matches the population in the area, whereas the DNA from the women with the deformed skulls resembles populations in what is now Romania and Bulgaria. In those regions, boys and girls from well-off families had elongated skulls.
According to the team of scientists, the women with the deformed skulls must have come from the East, and as there are no men, they probably did not immigrate as part of a group. They were most probably married off to the rulers of the area in connection with political alliances between Medieval European regions.