Pseudohistory

I am currently reading about world history.  I am currently reading A History of the World by Andrew Marr.  The previous read was What Happened in Prehistory by Peter Neal Peregrine.  My next book will be History of the World from 20th to 21st Century by J. A. S. Grenville.

I came across a topic which I wanted to see about what Youtube had for documentaries about it.  During the search, I located a video Things archaeologists won't touch.  The video was of a "lecture" by a guy who was positing that we had far more advanced beings on earth than archaeologists are willing to admit.  The presenter showed a number of things with alternative explanations which I already knew were debunked.  But one thing which I saw was reminiscent of The Indiana Jones' Crystal Skull movie.  The presenter showed a photograph of a collection of elongated skulls.  That sparked my interest.  I did not think much of it when the Indiana Jones movie portrayed it since all of the Indiana Jones movies take huge liberties with the portrayal of archaeology.  But I wanted to find out what the supposedly real elongated skulls were about.

So I googled elongated skulls.  In addition to Snopes' page about it, a Wikipedia article and other more scholarly resources came up for "artificial cranial deformation".  It turns out that the skulls in the Youtube presentation showed examples of something still being done in modern times.  The elongated skulls occur when infants' heads are wrapped tightly or otherwise bound.  There are even living examples of this.

So here is another person who is promoting pseudohistory where more accurate history is readily available.  I would think that the readily available access to scholarly information would lessen the amount of bogus portrayals of history.  But pseudoscience is clearly still a thing.  This guy was even going so far as to condemn archaeologists for their more careful approaches to interpreting evidence.

The topic about elongated sculls is a case where there is a crossfire of misinformation.  We have a mainstream and other movies which portray the elongated skulls as aliens.  A casual Youtube search for some people might then land them on the "Things archaeologists won't touch" video.  Then some of these people will quote the guy in the video as if he is supplying factual information.

This reinforces my negative view of the "creative licence" often taken regarding historical accuracy in movies and TV.  The Crystal Skull movie basically took an existing fake history and expanded it into a full movie.  This, in turn, can influence some people to do a casual search which lands them on the pseudohistorical articles.  Then the fakery is perpetuated.

Speaking of historical fakery, Some of the replies to the debunking comments to the aforementioned "lecture" referenced the Starchild skull.  Some people have latched onto that as further proof of aliens.  But it doesn't take much research to location tests done on the skull and a well documented medical condition which even has modern photographs of children with skulls like the Starchild skull.