The history of Homo sapiens is the history of delusions, hallucinations, drugs, dysmorphic traits, schizophrenic behavior, day-dreaming.

Thinking that those traits are pathological is naive.

I fact, If those traits were pathological, decreasing our fitness, they would have disappeared through the process of natural selection. Instead, those traits are reinforcing generation by generation, meaning that they constitute a biological advantage.

Let’s sign into the dysmorphic trait. Plastic surgeries procedure are nowadays skyrocketing. The urgency of changing the phenotype among Homo Sapiens has become overwhelming. And no species, nor our ancestors (e.g. Homo Abilis or Homo of Nearderthal) have ever felt this need.

We can find this dysmorphic trait also in ancient populations of Homo sapiens. Look at these elongated skulls discovered by the archeologist Julio Tello, on the southern coast of Peru in the desert peninsula of Paracas in 1928. He discovered 300 of these type of skulls.

Cranial deformation was a deeply rooted practice among the ancient Maya. When the boy or girl was born, the Mayan woman laid the child in a compression cradle, tying the head, abdomen and legs very firmly. Thus beginning with the process of cranial deformation, which was essential to put into practice from the first days of the infant’s birth to take advantage of the plasticity of the skull.

Diego de Landa in his Relation to the things of Yucatan, describes the process of skull modification as follows:

“Four or five days after the baby was born, they put it lying down on a small bed made of rods, and there, face down, they put his head between two slats: one on the nut and the other on the forehead between which pressed it so tightly and kept it there suffering until the end of a few days their heads were flat and molded, as they all used it. […] and when they had already removed the torment of flattening their foreheads and heads, they went with them to the priest so that he could see the fate and say the job that they had to have and put the name that they had to bear during their childhood“

We can find similar dysmorphic habits in several indigenous population, like Ethiopians (who would deform the lips with wooden objects) or Thailandese women (who would elongate the neck using a series of rings).