The Paracas skulls are elongated human skulls from burials of the Paracas culture, which flourished on the south coast of Peru from around 800 BCE until roughly the turn of the era. Archaeologists attribute their shape to artificial cranial modification: binding an infant's soft skull with boards and cloth so that it grew long and narrow. Claims that DNA tests prove a non-human or foreign origin come from unpublished, privately commissioned tests and have not been confirmed by peer-reviewed science.
The skulls matter because they sit where two conversations meet. For archaeologists they record identity, status and medicine in one of the Andes' great early societies. For alternative researchers, including Billy Carson, they raise the question of whether a distinct elite lineage once lived among ordinary people. Both depend on getting the evidence right.
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Who were the Paracas people?
The Paracas were an Andean society centred on the Paracas Peninsula and the nearby valleys of today's Ica Region, active from about 800 BCE to the first century BCE or CE, depending on the chronology used. Most specialists describe them as a network of local chiefdoms that managed scarce water through irrigation in one of the driest landscapes on Earth.
They are best known for textiles. The embroidered mantles from the Paracas burials are counted among the finest cloth made anywhere in the ancient Americas. The Paracas were followed on the same coast by the Nasca culture, which inherited much of its imagery and is famous for the desert geoglyphs covered in our article on the Nazca Lines.
What Julio Tello found on the Paracas Peninsula
The Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello, often called the father of Peruvian archaeology, first visited the peninsula on 26 July 1925. With his student Toribio Mejía Xesspe he excavated shaft tombs cut into the hill of Cerro Colorado, which he named the Paracas Cavernas. These bottle-shaped tombs held many burials each.
In 1927 Tello's team moved to a second cemetery on the hill's slope, Wari Kayan, which he called the Paracas Necropolis. On 25 October 1927 they uncovered the first of what became 429 funerary bundles: seated bodies wrapped in layer after layer of textiles, with offerings tucked inside. Only around a hundred of these bundles were opened and inventoried between 1930 and 1960, so Paracas research is still going on. Popular articles often date the discovery to 1928; the excavation years are 1925 for the Cavernas and 1927 for the Necropolis.
How were the Paracas skulls elongated?
The Paracas skulls were shaped deliberately in infancy, a practice anthropologists call artificial or intentional cranial modification. A newborn's skull bones are soft and not yet fused, so pads, boards and tight bindings applied from the first weeks of life, and typically kept on for months, redirect growth. A 2022 study of skulls from the Paracas Cavernas by Juliana Gómez-Mejía and colleagues in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports found that the large majority were visibly modified, mainly in two shapes, tabular erect and bilobate, and interpreted the practice as a marker of group identity.
Paracas was not unusual in this. Head shaping was practised across the Andes and among the Maya of Mesoamerica. In Late Antiquity the Huns and the East Germanic peoples under their rule, including Gepids, Ostrogoths and Burgundians, shaped their children's heads, and the site has covered elongated skulls found in Croatia from that same Migration Period. The Mangbetu of north-eastern Congo bound infants' heads with cloth into the twentieth century, and in the region of Toulouse in France a form of binding known as the "Toulouse deformity" survived sporadically into the early twentieth century.
Does head binding explain the size, weight and sutures?
Head binding changes the shape of the skull, not the amount of brain inside it. Studies of Peruvian samples have found no statistically significant difference in cranial capacity between modified and unmodified skulls; the volume is redistributed, so a skull that is longer is also narrower or lower.
Promoters of the skulls go further. In 2014, coverage of the Paracas History Museum collection stated that some skulls had a cranial volume "up to 25 percent larger" and were "60 percent heavier" than normal skulls, and later interviews pointed to a rear-placed foramen magnum and a missing sagittal suture, the seam that normally runs front to back between the two parietal bones. These figures have not been published with measurement methods in a peer-reviewed study, which is the step that would let other researchers check them.
The suture argument also has a documented biological explanation. In a 1996 study in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Christine D. White examined Maya skulls from Lamanai in Belize and found that fronto-occipital head shaping was significantly associated with premature fusion of the sagittal suture. In other words, the pressure of the binding apparatus on a growing skull can itself cause the seam to close early. A missing suture is therefore expected in some heavily modified skulls, not evidence of a separate species.
What does trepanation in the Paracas skulls show?
Many Paracas skulls also carry the earliest known evidence of trepanation in the Americas: the surgical removal of a piece of the skull while the patient was alive. Surgeons scraped or drilled through the bone with stone tools, often at the site of a depressed fracture, the kind of wound left by the slings and clubs found in Paracas bundles.
The bone tells whether patients lived. Where the cut edges show smooth regrowth, the person survived for months or years. In his 2016 book Holes in the Head, the bioarchaeologist John W. Verano estimates from the healing patterns that close to four in ten Paracas patients survived long-term, while a similar share died during or soon after the operation. It is a reminder that the people in these graves were patients, warriors and ancestors, not specimens.
The Paracas skulls DNA claims
The DNA story began in February 2014. Ancient Origins reported that the researcher and tour operator Brien Foerster had released preliminary results from samples taken at the privately owned Paracas History Museum, whose owner, Juan Navarro, held a collection of 35 skulls. Samples of hair, a tooth, skull bone and skin were taken from five skulls, and material from three was sent to a geneticist who was not named. Foerster relayed the geneticist's statement that one sample had mitochondrial DNA "with mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far."
A second round of testing was reported in 2016. This time samples were said to have gone to three unnamed laboratories, one in Canada and two in the United States, and the claimed results were the opposite of "unknown": mitochondrial haplogroups H2a, associated with Eastern Europe, and T2b, associated with the Near East. The lab reports were reproduced in L. A. Marzulli's book Nephilim Hybrids, and Foerster later discussed further haplogroups, including U2e and H1a, in a 2017 video. When Ancient Origins revisited the story in 2024, it noted that, as far as it could establish, no further testing had been done.
Geneticists have not accepted these results, for reasons that apply to any ancient-DNA claim:
- No peer review. None of the results has appeared in a scientific journal, so methods and raw data have not been independently examined.
- Anonymous labs. The geneticists and laboratories were not named, so no one can check their procedures.
- No chain of custody or replication. The samples came from a private collection with no published excavation or handling record, and no independent lab has repeated the work.
- High contamination risk. Hair and handled museum bone are easily contaminated with modern DNA, and the haplogroups reported, H, T and U, are common in people of European and Near Eastern descent, exactly what contamination from modern handlers would produce. Alan Cooper and Hendrik Poinar's 2000 paper in Science, "Ancient DNA: do it right or not at all", set out the clean-room and replication standards the field uses for this reason.
The swing from "unknown to science" in 2014 to "European and Middle Eastern" in 2016 is itself a warning sign.
What published ancient DNA says about Peru's south coast
Peer-reviewed genetics places the ancient peoples of Peru's south coast firmly within Native American ancestry. The most comprehensive study, Nathan Nakatsuka and colleagues' "A Paleogenomic Reconstruction of the Deep Population History of the Andes" (Cell, 2020), analysed genome-wide data from 89 individuals dating from about 9,000 to 500 years ago. Its south-coast samples include burials from the lower Ica Valley, from Los Molinos in Palpa and Late Nasca burials at Monte Grande in the Nasca drainage. The authors found genetic continuity at Ica and Palpa from about 1,480 to 515 years ago, spanning the end of the Nasca culture.
A second 2020 study, by Jacob Bongers and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used ancient DNA from the Chincha Valley, just north of Paracas, to identify people moved there from the north coast under Inca rule. The method can detect real migrations in this region; what it finds is movement within the Andes.
No peer-reviewed genome from an elongated Paracas skull has been published. Until one is, the honest position is that the skulls belong to a Native Andean population whose genetics have not yet been studied directly.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson starts from the same point as the anthropologists. In his 4biddenknowledge Podcast episode The Secret Elongated Skulls of Egypt and Peru, he acknowledges that infant head binding is an established practice. His question is whether binding explains every case. He argues that certain skulls, particularly the Paracas skulls and the elongated heads of Akhenaten's daughters in Egyptian royal art, present features such as unusual cranial volume and missing sutures that may not be fully explained by binding alone.
Carson also notes that elongated heads appear connected to priests, nobles and ruling bloodlines rather than ordinary people, and asks whether the shape reflects cultural fashion or the preserved memory of a physically different lineage, one remembered as connected to the gods. He frames this as an invitation to examine the anatomical details rather than leap to extraterrestrial conclusions. His video "Mystery of the Elongated Skulls" and his video on King Tut's bloodline explore the same question from the Peruvian and Egyptian sides; for the Egyptian background see Akhenaten and the Amarna period.
This is his line of inquiry, not an established finding: the volume claims remain unpublished, missing sutures have a documented link to head shaping, and the DNA results discussed above do not meet scientific standards.
Watch, read and go deeper
Billy's video on the elongated skulls sits alongside his wider work on ancient sites in the Megalithic Mysteries series on 4BK TV. The full audio discussion is on the podcast episode page, and his case for Peru's place in a lost global civilization is in Billy Carson on Sacsayhuamán, the Anunnaki and the megaliths. His broader argument about the gods and ancient bloodlines is collected on the Anunnaki topic hub, and the 4biddenknowledge tours page lists current trips for anyone who wants to see the sites in person.
Frequently asked questions
Are the Paracas skulls alien?
No published evidence shows that they are. Their shape matches artificial cranial modification, a practice documented on several continents, and the DNA claims of a non-human origin came from an unnamed geneticist and were never published or replicated. Ancient DNA from Peru's south coast that has been peer-reviewed is Native American.
How old are the Paracas skulls?
The Paracas culture dates from around 800 BCE to roughly the turn of the era, so most Paracas skulls are about 2,000 to 2,800 years old. Julio Tello excavated the main cemeteries on the Paracas Peninsula in 1925 and 1927.
Where can you see the Paracas skulls?
Elongated skulls are displayed at the Regional Museum of Ica and at the privately owned Paracas History Museum. Many of the Paracas Necropolis textiles from Tello's excavations are held by the National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History of Peru in Lima.
Did cranial binding harm the brain?
Studies of Peruvian samples have found no significant difference in cranial capacity between modified and unmodified skulls, because binding redistributes volume rather than reducing it. Research has linked heavy binding to side effects such as early fusion of the sagittal suture.
Has a Paracas skull been DNA tested?
Privately commissioned tests were announced in 2014 and 2016, but their results have not been published in a scientific journal and the labs were not named. No peer-reviewed genome from an elongated Paracas skull has been published. Peer-reviewed studies of nearby Ica, Palpa and Nasca burials show Native Andean ancestry.
Sources and further reading
- Richard E. Daggett, "The Paracas Mummy Bundles of the Great Necropolis of Wari Kayan: A History," Andean Past, vol. 4 (1994)
- Juliana Gómez-Mejía, Delia Aponte, Luis Pezo-Lanfranco and Sabine Eggers, "Intentional cranial modification as a marker of identity in Paracas Cavernas, South-Central Coast of Peru," Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 41 (2022)
- Christine D. White, "Sutural effects of fronto-occipital cranial modification," American Journal of Physical Anthropology 100 (1996)
- John W. Verano, "Holes in the Head: The Art and Archaeology of Trepanation in Ancient Peru" (Dumbarton Oaks, 2016)
- Nathan Nakatsuka et al., "A Paleogenomic Reconstruction of the Deep Population History of the Andes," Cell (2020)
- Jacob L. Bongers et al., "Integration of ancient DNA with transdisciplinary dataset finds strong support for Inca resettlement in the south Peruvian coast," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020)
- Alan Cooper and Hendrik N. Poinar, "Ancient DNA: do it right or not at all," Science 289 (2000)
