This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Nearly 3,000 years ago, in central Italy, dozens of Picene people were laid to rest curled up on their sides, as if asleep. When their eternal slumber was disturbed thousands of years later, researchers noted a curiously familiar pattern, one many modern parents and doctors fret over: As infants, many of them had developed a flat spot on their heads.
Known as deformational plagiocephaly or, more commonly, flat head syndrome, the deformation results from prolonged pressure on an infant's head, causing the bone to flatten. Typically, flattened skulls like these have been blamed on the Back to Sleep campaign of the 1990s, which told parents to lay their babies on their backs to reduce the risk of sudden infant death. But these skulls date to the 9th and 8th centuries B.C., making them the earliest known cases in Italy and suggesting flat head syndrome has shaped infants' heads for millennia.
"The presence of plagiocephaly in ancient individuals shows that this is not exclusively a modern condition," Michael Allen Beck De Lotto, of the University of Padua and lead author of the study published in the International Journal of Paleopathology, said. "Rather than being alarming, I think this makes the condition particularly interesting from a bioarchaeological perspective." A baby's skull is soft and flexible, allowing it to squeeze through the narrow birth canal and expand as its brain grows rapidly after birth, the study authors wrote. The trade-off is that the same soft and flexible head is prone to being reshaped and flattened from acts as simple as lying on their back or being strapped into car seats, a phenomenon seen in up to 47% of modern infants ages 7 to 12 weeks.
How common flat head syndrome was in the past is more difficult to tell. "Skulls are rarely completely preserved," Beck De Lotto said, explaining that burial damage like soil weight and moisture can also alter the shape of the head, "... making this condition difficult to recognize confidently." A few years earlier, Beck De Lotto noticed a few skulls while working at a commercial dig; each had a flattened skull. Back then, he didn't have time to investigate further, but he kept an eye out for more skulls like those.
Then, during his Ph.D., another opportunity presented itself. Since the 1990s, excavations at the two cemeteries at Matelica have uncovered 26 individuals with preserved or restored skulls, 42% of whom had abnormally shaped heads, the study reports. Seven were male, and four were female, each with a flattened head often concentrated on the right side, a pattern that broadly mirrors what modern doctors see in infants today.
But a flat spot on the head does not prove much, so the researchers set out to rule out other explanations. Millennia of soil pressure can warp a skull's shape, but the individuals buried at Matelica all lay on their right sides, yet flattening appeared on both sides. The soil weight also couldn't have warped the skulls, as the broken pieces fit neatly back together, suggesting whatever flattened their heads had to have happened in infancy.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
