I had a chance to study a skull that is about to be returned to authorities following the death of an archaeologist who had it in his possession. Could seem like a typical ancient skull in an ancient cliff-dwelling region of Arizona, that is until you compare it with known skulls.
Let's begin with this comparison. Homo sapiens on the left, strange skull on the right. Let's give it a name. As she seems to be female, let's call her "Missy Skull."
Look at the front on image of Missy Skull. The eye sockets are all kind of wrong. Very odd. Look at the width at the temples. It appears as if she's missing the central suture line that runs down the middle of our foreheads vertically. The inlets at the rear of the eye sockets for optic nerves is very perfectly shaped and slender on the strange skull. The skull bulges a bit like a muffin top on the top of the skull. It measures 18-3/4" around the widest part of the skull across the forehead. That is small and with a very flat brow ridge, I'm assuming female. The nasal hole is rather odd shaped too. When I see the eye sockets, I am reminded of the Cherokee legend of the moon-eyed people.
LINK: A small, pale, nocturnal race found in Cherokee tradition, the so-called “Moon-Eyed” people of the Appalachian mountains remain a legend in the area, and one that still drives researchers to learn just who these people may have been...This legend has it, the Moon-Eyed people were an entire race of physically small inhabitants of a wooded area near what is now Murphy, North Carolina. With pale, white skin and bearded faces, their large, blue eyes were said to be so sensitive to the sun that they were only able to operate by the light of the moon, hence the name, “Moon-Eyed.” (Missy's skull measured 18-3/4 inches circumference across the widest part of the forehead/head. At 5'8", mine measures 23-1/4")
And once again my research takes me back to the Denisovans puzzle. People adapted to higher, darker latitudes, perhaps even cave living, adapted larger eyes. LINK TO ARTICLE
As a side note, Bigfoot are often reported to have huge eyes and to do most of their work at night, showing serious sensitivity to lights like headlines and flashlights. If they were mountain adapted, this would make sense.
See this cat skull's eye sockets below -
Let's try and compare her now to three sets of races in the world. Still not finding a match, are we? The muffin-top head, the narrow temples, the odd-shaped eye sockets....
Neanderthal had large eye sockets, narrow at the temples. But the top of the head was rather flat and low.
Kennewick Man (above) still has squared eye sockets.
The Paracas skulls (above) were said to be elongated by deformation as a baby, but this would not change the eye socket size. The sutures on the skulls show a very different kind of skull by nature. These skulls have larger eye sockets. The Missy Skull has a pointed back head and large eye sockets. LEARN MORE AT THIS LINK
Chimpanzee has closest shape to Missy's eyes, also narrow at the temples and low nose hole, and protruding upper mandible.
Now look at the nose hole above on the Paracas skull and our Missy Skull.
Remember the "Massey Man" captured in a photo in a cave in the Northwestern United States?
Note the blue "moon eye" and odd socket and narrow temple??
Once again, look at the nose hole of us on the left (below) and Missy Skull on the right (below)
This ancient Nazca (Peru) skull adds an interesting contrast. Head shape is more comparable and narrow temples, but eye sockets still aren't truly teardrop shaped.
Let's look at the ancient Paracas of Peru - large eyes.
The shape of the skull is all kinds of weird. It is sort of butt-shaped in the back and pointed from the side.
From the rear, she reminded me of the sort of South Pacific skull shape. I compared it to the "slope-headed" skull I evaluated from the Humboldt Sink, but you can see - not a match -
I recalled a similar shaped skull evaluated from photos Don Monroe took in the Humboldt Museum basement in the 1970s and that MK Davis noted had a Polynesian shape!
Was her head purposefully elongated?
Well, comparing the find (top) and a Homo sapiens (bottom) and comparing with the chart as to the distortion of the sutures.... looks like no tampering.
But, there is a strangeness in the back sutures of the head. Ours make an inverted V, but this skull is squared off.
The study of the "Missy Skull" findings will continue for some time, no doubt. I have word in to some experts to review the photographs and measures. I will definitely keep the discussion going.
Another interesting find is the space between the nasal cavity and the teeth. The nasal hole is very odd as it does not go up to mid-eye like ours does.
Homo sapiens (above)
Since the head was found with no body, it seems the underneath shows perhaps beheading trauma.
I sketched up loosely what this Missy Skull might have looked like.
Feel your eye sockets around your eyes, only slightly bigger than the eye itself. Imagine how large this girl's eyes were! Her cheekbones were prominent but in profile you see her lower face protruded forward, almost reminds me of Julia Pastrano who had hypertrichosis and the accompanying hyperplasia, but the jaw on this skull does not show an issue with hyperplasia in the teeth area, so this mouth area protrusion (look at profile) must have been a natural shape.
I will continue to review the documented skull and hope that when it is handed over to the right authority/anthropology department, that we learn more from their own studies of it.
One more creepy thing -
Our eye sockets are squarish/rectangular. This one is teardrop-shaped. Feel your eye socket. It pretty much is close to the eye except above where there is space for the eyelid to tuck in. With the bottom teardrop of these eye sockets, there is a creepy possibility there was a lower eyelid much like an upper one. Or, she could have had the strong ligaments around the eye like the Massey Man (above) who likely utilized that to draw up and protect the eye from light.
ARTICLE: This article linked here has to do with higher latitude people growing bigger brains and bigger eyes to handle darker conditions. Interesting, eh? Look at the skull -
I will continue to study the findings and report back on the path this skull takes and the conclusions we can make. Suffice to say, this Missy Skull is a highly unusual find that can't seem to be categorized by any known race now or earlier....
UPDATED POST ON MISSY - LINK
You might enjoy my post about the tiny people - LINK.
Update
Another unusual race in the earliest Southwest?
LINK: The earliest people in our Southwest about whom we have any very definite knowledge are the long-headed Basket Makers, Hooton83 describing them as a sub-race of the American, under the name of Palae-American. They show markedly dolichocephalic head-form, short stature and slight build, and black wavy hair. Today he considers that this type is probably represented in mixed form in many of the Amazonian tribes, possibly among the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego and also in Central America among the Lacandones. Many of the early dolichocephals show no evidences of Mongoloid head-form, and Hooton thinks they may have spread over North and South America before the period of the Mongoloid invasions.
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As I am living on land once inhabited by the HoHoKam (a tribe that went missing long ago), I looked into the archaeologic digs of their cemetery here.
What I found was very intriguing -
LINK: The Hohokam are believed not to have practised deformation, while all the skulls derived from burials were posteriorly flattened.
And -
(two kinds of skulls found in the burial area) The head form was brachycephalic and showed a pronounced occipital flattening. In some parts of the area at least, these two ethnic groups appear to have lived amicably side by side, although the fraternization did not lead to the emergence of a single hybrid culture.
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So, did Missy live amicably aside the Sinagua? And, if so, why was her skull buried, but not her body?
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