I thought I read somewhere that some cultures bound the heads of newborns and continued through childhood to create this condition.
I may be out in left field but I coulda sworn it was used as an indication of status......of course, there’s the distinct possiblity I could have dreamt the whole thing. 😁
You are correct-head binding was practiced in societies in various areas of the world including what is now central and South America, and even on a Caribbean island or two-as well as parts of Eurasia and the Middle East. Children of the nobility got their heads bound with boards or tied tightly with cloth right after birth to make them into a strange ideal of beauty/nobility/intelligence, with a deformed skull-poor little kids.
The Chinese bound the feet of girl babies to keep the feet tiny by deforming them. Tiny, deformed feet were a standard of beauty for them-the girls grew up off-balance, barely able to take a few steps on their own-mostly they had to be carried around in a litter. That cruel practice only was exposed in the 1600’s when foreigners were trading in China and saw how cruel the foot binding was...
One of my cousins was married to an archaeologist-he was a Paleo-Indian expert-he told my 1st husband and I all about that head-binding when we participated in one of his digs in Southern Mexico on our vacation one Spring-there was one of those deformed skulls in a museum there, too-creepy looking...