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NARRATOR: New York City, February 2017.
At New York University, Giorgio Tsoukalos meets with art
collector, Jared Collins, who is in possession
of a 2,000-year-old elongated skull.
Oh, wow.
That is fantastic.
NARRATOR: The skull is incredibly well-preserved
and Jared is having it tested at the university to find out
if it might possibly contain abnormalities that indicate it
is something other than human.
He agreed to meet Giorgio outside of the anthropology lab
for a first look at the skull.
So how did this come to be in your possession?
Well, it's not actually mine, it is on loan to me.
Me and one of my colleagues contacted a museum
and we asked them do you have an elongated skull
in your collection.
And they said they have just one, this one.
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And have they told you anything about it,
like the provenance?
Actually, strangely, this has been in storage for decades.
They have never tested it, they had
very little information on it.
They know it's absolutely Caracas.
So this skull was found in the Caracas region of Peru?
That's right.
But no real modern testing has ever been done on this.
Oh, this is amazing.
So let's go, right?
OK.
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NARRATOR: NYU Professor of Anthropology,
Dr. Todd Disotell, agreed to conduct a forensic evaluation
of the elongated skull.
I've seen casts, I've never seen one in person.
OK.
Wow.
That is freaky.
I mean, I just can't come up with another term.
I love that your first reaction is that it's freaky
because I agree with you.
Well, I mean, look at it.
It's quite bizarre.
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Let me just move it over to the sterile bench surface.
Wow.
So what's very fascinating, besides the shape,
the sagittal suture looks like it has completely fused.
I'm holding it, I'm looking at it,
and it's just been completely obliterated.
NARRATOR: The sagittal suture is the seam
where the two parietal bones of the skull come together.
Although the markings may be faint due to fusing over time,
all human skulls are expected to have
some evidence of this feature.
So it is curious that this skull does not.
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Nor do the skulls of a number of other mysterious specimens
that have been collected and examined by various experts.
One of the great enigmas of planet Earth
is that all over the world we find skeletons with people
having these elongated skulls.
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NARRATOR: For centuries, various native cultures
have engaged in the ritual practice of artificially
elongating their skulls by tightly
wrapping the heads of their children through infancy.
However, these skulls still feature evidence
of the cranial sutures.
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OK, let's move on to extracting some tooth and bone
powder to get DNA out of that.
OK.
Excellent.
NARRATOR: In order to obtain the needed genetic material
from the artifact, Dr. Disotell will need to remove a tooth
and drill into it to extract the samples.
The analysis of the material will determine the sex,
ancestral lineage of both the father and the mother,
and any DNA anomalies when compared with a
current human genetic database.
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Looks pretty good.
We will pack this up and send it off.
And in four to six weeks, they should have the result.
Four to six weeks?
OK.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate your input on this.
Take care, gents.
You got it.
NARRATOR: Los Angeles, California, April 2017.
All right, Todd.
You got the results?
Yeah.
And they're very, very interesting.
NARRATOR: Two months after their initial examination,
Giorgio is online with Dr. Disotell
to receive the results of the DNA test
they performed on the elongated skull.
They did get a good clean DNA profile from
the maternally-inherited DNA, so this particular specimen is
actually not found in the New World, not
found amongst Native Americans.
And it's typically found amongst Europeans
and Middle Easterners.
In fact, the 100% match was to a Scottish individual.
This makes no sense whatsoever.
Really?
In a South American skull?
This is all very strange.
That could mean that people from Europe
got to South America 1,500 years earlier
than we currently understand that.