Babies Buried Wearing ‘Helmets’ Made of Skulls of Other Children Discovered in Ecuador

While the head of humans is a powerful symbol in many cultures in South America, archeologists at a site in Ecuador were surprised to find that two babies buried with “helmet” made from the skulls of other kids. 

The Salango ritual complex on the central coast, dating back to approximately 100BC, was a site used as a funerary platform by a chiefdom culture called Guangala.

During the excavation between 2014 and 2016, 11 individuals buried with small artifacts, shells, and stone ancestor figurines. More notably, two infants were found with the modified skulls of others encasing their heads.

The research team – composed of Sara Juengst and Abigail Bythell of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Richard Lunniss and Juan José Ortiz Aguilu of the Universidad Técnica de Manabí in Ecuador – explained this unusual burial ritual in a new article published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

One burial was that of an infant who was about 18 months old when they died. In describing the image of this burial, Juengst and colleagues note that “the modified cranium of a second juvenile was placed in a helmet-like fashion around the head of the first, such that the primary individual’s face looked through and out of the cranial vault of the second.”

The human skull helmet came from another child between 4-12 years at death. The second infant was only about 6-9 months old at death, with a skull helmet made from a child who was between 2-12 years at death.

In studying both burials, the archaeologists noticed that there was very little space between the primary skeletons and their skull helmets, “suggesting the simultaneous burial of the primary individual and the additional cranium.”

While isolated skulls are often found in South American mortuary contexts, they are typically adults who are victims of war or are idolized ancestors.

Children’s heads are far less commonly found by archaeologists, causing Juengst and colleagues to suggest that this unusual or symbolic form of burial at Salango “may represent an attempt to ensure the protection of these ‘pre-social and wild’ souls.”

Surrounding the infants with stone ancestor figurines may have further empowered the heads, providing protective measures for these prematurely deceased individuals, they write.

“We’re still pretty shocked by the find,” “Not only is it unprecedented, but there are also still so many questions.” She is hoping that in-progress DNA and isotope analyses will contribute new information to understanding who the children were and whether they were related to the individuals who became their skull helmets.

Juengst says that there are “various possibilities for the origin of the extra crania, from potentially curated ancestor skulls to them being worn in life as well as in death, so we definitely have a lot of ideas to work with.”

Bioarchaeologist Sara Becker of the University of California Riverside calls this burial practice “pretty amazing – I’ve never heard of anything like it elsewhere in the Andes.”

In considering Juengst and colleagues’ findings, Becker suggests that it “makes me consider practices elsewhere where heads are buried in chests as if they are ‘seeds’ to help with agricultural productivity. I do wonder if it has something to do with rebirth, and if these children could have been important symbols of that.”

Sîan Halcrow of the University of Otago, an expert on ancient burials of children, also finds this new research study fascinating for its implications for the study of evidence of disease on children’s bodies.

Halcrow points out that Juengst and colleagues discovered evidence of anemia on the bones of both the two primary infants as well as the individuals who were used as helmets.

While “the authors state that this finding is unusual for the area and time period,” Halcrow thinks “this is likely due to the previous lack of interest of the study of infant disease in the region and development of new methods for identifying disease in this age group.” Further analysis of children’s skeletons is an ongoing research theme in the bioarchaeology of South America.

This unique Ecuadorian mortuary practice may seem strange, even within the context of ancient Andean cultures replete with the imagery and manipulation of heads, because of the young age of all of the children involved.

“Dealing with the death of young infants is always emotional,” Juengst concludes, “but in this case, it was strangely comforting that those who buried them took extra time and care to do it in a special place, perhaps accompanied by special people, in order to honor them.”

500-Year-Old Incan ‘Princess’ Mummy Finally Returned To Bolivia After 129 Years

Some 129 years after it was donated to the Michigan State University Museum, a 500-year-old Incan Girl’s mummy has been returned to Bolivia and an official says that human remains of archeological significance are the first time being repatriated back to the Andean country.

Known as Ñusta, a Quechua word for ‘Princess,’ the mummy amazes many because of its excellent state of preservation: Its black braids seem recently combed and its hands still cling to small feathers.

Experts say the mummy originally came from a region in the Andean highlands near La Paz during the last years of the Inca civilization. 

Radiocarbon tests also have revealed that it dates to the second half of the 15th century, confirming the likelihood that its tomb burial preceded the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the conquest of the Inca by the Spanish.

‘Despite the fact that it was given the name Ñusta, or ‘Princess,’ we don’t know if she was really a princess.

We will only be able to answer that with DNA studies,’ said William A. Lovis, an MSU emeritus professor of anthropology who worked for years to help bring the remains home.

The mummy was returned more than two weeks ago with the assistance of the U.S. embassy in La Paz, and a new study is expected to be carried out by November by Bolivian academics and foreign experts. 

Until then, accompanying funerary objects will be exhibited to the public during a celebration that pays homage to the dead on Nov. 2.

Culture Minister Wilma Alanoca said that in recent years, the Bolivian government has achieved the repatriation of several archaeological goods that were taken illegally, but this is the first time that a body has been brought back.

‘It’s the first time that a body has been recovered, a mummy from the Inca period,’ she said.

Still, many mysteries remain unsolved.

The girl, who is thought to have been part of an ethnic Aymara group known as the Pacajes, had originally been placed in a stone tomb along with sandals, a small clay jar, pouches, feathers and several types of plants including maize and coca – perhaps because some Andean civilizations believed that offerings helped the dead transition into the next life.

‘It’s possible that the girl was an important person and that the objects placed with her had as much sacred importance as they had a useful purpose,’ said Lovis. 

‘Another possibility is that her death was an Inca sacrifice to appease or an offer to Inca deities.’

Ñusta is believed to have been about 8 years old when she died and was buried in a dress made with threads from llama or alpaca, animals which were domesticated more than 4,000 years ago in the Andes and still roam the highlands of Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, and Chile.

David Trigo, who heads the National Archaeology Museum in La Paz, said the well-kept objects open new doors into a society that has barely been studied.

‘We can say that she was an important member of her ethnic group,’ Trigo said, referring to Incan and Aymara traditions of building adobe or stone tombs known as chullpa for elite members of their communities.

For now, the remains are being preserved in a refrigerated chamber at the National Archaeology Museum in downtown La Paz.

Fossil Hunters Found Bones From An Ancient Whale… And Then They Saw The Bite Marks

At the top of the water surface, there was tremendous turmoil. An island of flesh, once comfortably living and swimming through the ancient seas, bobbed silently, at times yanked violently to the side or jolted upward by forces below it.

A huge prehistoric seabird called Pelagornis miocaenus, which circles lazily above the scene, may have noticed that the whale carcass in its entirety, partially exposed to the air, but much of it underwater.

He had seen the many sharks that surrounded him. Some take breaths, shaking the flesh off the body and go away. Others may have attacked the whale from below, propelling themselves teeth first into the dead mammal.

The head and snout of a lone great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) may have appeared amongst the waves, biting off chunks from the dead whale’s side.

A whale this size isn’t devoured in a day, no matter how hungry the sharks encircling it was. With the tastier options—the tongue and most of the fatty flesh—eaten away, the carcass was beginning to come apart. The head had long since detached, its skull drifting down to the seafloor. Other parts were carried off to be eaten, the bones discarded elsewhere. Eventually, whatever gases or fat content kept the carcass afloat would dissipate, and it would sink.

One of the whale’s fins, in shreds, had already sunk to the sand. Ancient fish may have snacked on the threads of flesh still clinging to the exposed bones. Marine invertebrates such as worms and bryozoans attached themselves onto what remained.

In time, the remnants of this fin were covered by the seafloor. Those same remnants saw daylight again over 2 million years later, in September 2016. Professor Joaquín Atencio, two of his students, Joel Orocú and Patricio Pimentel, and Joel’s father, Félix Orocú, discovered the exposed fossil whale bones when the tide was out in the Burica Peninsula of Panama.

After spotting the fossils in the coastal outcrop, Atencio called Carlos Jaramillo, a geologist, and paleontologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who in turn put together a team of scientists to excavate them. They uncovered several disarticulated fossil whale bones and a fossil shark tooth nearby.

The research into these bones culminated in a paper published recently in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica: “Shark-cetacean trophic interactions during the late Pliocene in the Central Eastern Pacific (Panama).”

The authors determined that these bones belonged to a type of Balaenopterid, a genus of filter-feeding whales that includes today’s humpback and blue whales. Fin bones alone are not enough to determine the exact species or the size of the marine mammal, but these particular bones did offer tantalizing clues into the last moments of this animal.

“When we collected the whale fossils,” explained lead author Dirley Cortés, a paleobiologist at Redpath Museum, McGill University, “from the beginning we were really surprised about the giant size of the appendicular bones. After a while of inspection, we realized some of the bones had strange serrated marks across the surface, we came up with the exciting hypothesis of shark bite marks, but it took us more time to actually confirm it.”

One such bone, they reported, has 26 separate bite traces upon it. Studying such traces is the hallmark of ichnology, a field that specializes in the grooves, marks, edges, and prints left behind by living species. What might look like just a bunch of cracks on the ancient bone to the average person reads like an entire language to ichnologists, one that provides remarkable insight?

“Some of the bite traces show these very finely spaced parallel lines,” said Anthony Martin, ichnologist at Emory University, “which is typical of the kind of damage you would get from a serrated tooth. That damage is generally associated with sharks.”

Absent conclusive proof one way or the other, the authors conservatively propose that at least two different sharks may have scavenged upon this whale, perhaps great white sharks. Jorge Velez-Juarbe, the marine mammal curator for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, explained that this assumption is due to the size difference between the bite traces.

The scenario described at the start of this article may or may not have actually occurred. While fossils tell us a great deal, they don’t reveal every detail. We don’t know whether the whale was already dead at the time of the shark bites; we don’t know whether it was scavenged while floating on the surface or whether it had already sunk and was eaten on the seafloor. We also don’t know with certainty which species of shark gnawed on its flesh.

“From what we know, at the end of the Pliocene, there is an interesting mix of more modern fauna with other more ‘archaic’ or extinct groups,” Velez-Juarbe said. “This, of course, changed a bit at the end of the Neogene, when there seems to have been a marine megafauna extinction event.”

In other words, some of the creatures living in oceans 3.6 million to 2.58 million years ago are very much a part of our world today. We have filter-feeding whales and great white sharks off of our coasts. The story these fossils tell is one we can instantly imagine and understand. Today’s sharks are not known to attack full-grown whales. If their ancestors behaved in similar ways, then it is reasonable to assume ancient sharks scavenged—rather than killed then ate—this ancient whale. The bite traces support this.

“The vast majority of bite traces on bone are scavenging,” Martin said. “In many instances, and I think in this instance, too, there might not be enough flesh to prevent the teeth from contacting the bone. Once the teeth are contacting the bone, that means either that bone is exposed or the flesh is thin enough that the teeth can contact bone.”

“This finding is of scientific importance not only because we were able to tell much about sharks feeding on whales [in prehistoric times], but because of its temporal context. As we pointed out in the paper, the genetic diversity of cetaceans, and especially mysticetes, declined around the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary, an example of a global turnover event in the marine megafauna,” wrote Cortés in an email. “Fossil marine mammals, like the one preserved here, will be useful for understanding the dynamics of the marine fauna in one of the most critical periods of Earth history, the Plio-Pleistocene transition.”

Cortés emphasized the importance of further exploring the Burica Peninsula in Panama and other nearby sites. While whale fossils are common throughout the world, discoveries have been relatively few in Central and South America. The whale specimen described here is actually the first marine mammal recorded from the Neogene (a period that spanned from 23 million years ago to 2.58 million years ago) in the Burica Peninsula.

“One of the reasons,” Cortés offered, “maybe the lack of fully exposed Cenozoic outcrops in particular in the Pacific side of Central America, which makes it difficult to prospect this succession and get data. Another important reason is the number of researchers per capita.”

She described how paleontology is still an emerging science in countries such as Panama and Colombia. To illustrate this further, she explained that out of “1 million citizens, Colombia has less than 90 scientists, of which a minimum amount is involved in paleontology. Without enough paleontologists, research becomes challenged although the privileged way of life. And the panorama for women scientists does not look so encouraging either.”

“Something paleontologists always highlight is that no matter how complete, what matters most is the amazing story that fossil has to tell us,” wrote Cortés. The stories yet to be told—the fossils hidden for millions of years—are just waiting to be found.