In the Americas the Maya, Inca, and certain tribes of North American

In America the Maya, Inca, and certain tribes of North American locals performed the custom. In North America the practice was particularly known among the Chinookan tribes of the Northwest and the Choctaw of the Southeast. The Native American bunch known as the Flathead did not indeed practice head smoothing, yet were named all things considered rather than other Salishan individuals who utilized skull alteration to make the head show up rounder. Nonetheless, different tribes, including the Choctaw, Chehalis, and Nooksack Indians, did practice head leveling by strapping the newborn child's head to a cradleboard. The Lucayan individuals of the Bahamas polished it. The practice was likewise known among the Australian Aborigines. 

Maya altered skull displayed at the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México. 

Friedrich Ratzel in The History of Mankind reported in 1896 that twisting of the skull, both by leveling it behind and lengthening it towards the vertex, was found in detached examples in Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii, and the Paumotu gathering and happening most often on Mallicollo in the New Hebrides (today Malakula, Vanuatu), where the skull was crushed uncommonly level. 

Cranial twisting was likely performed to mean gathering connection, or to exhibit economic wellbeing. This may have assumed a key part in Maya public opinion. It could be gone for making a skull shape which is stylishly additionally satisfying or connected with alluring properties. For instance, in the Nahai-talking zone of Tomman Island and the south-western Malakulan (Australasia), an individual with a stretched head is thought to be more adroit, of higher status, and closer to the universe of the spirits. 

Deliberate cranial deformity was once regularly rehearsed in various societies broadly differentiated topographically and sequentially and still happens today in a couple of spots, in the same way as Vanuatu. 

Deliberate human cranial deformity is accepted to originate before recorded history. The soonest recommended cases incorporate the Proto-Neolithic Homo sapiens segment (ninth thousand years BC) from Shanidar Cave in Iraq and additionally among Neolithic people groups in Southwest Asia. Initially, the Neanderthal skulls found in the Neanderthal segment of Shanidar Cave were accepted to have been misleadingly distorted speaking to the most seasoned illustration of such practices by a huge number of years, however this later ended up being inaccurate. The cranial stays of example Shanidar 5 were recently remade in 1999 by the human studies group of Chech, Grove, Thorne, and Trinkaus where it was found the first remaking of the skull was in slip. Accordingly the group finished up "we probably won't consider that simulated cranial disfigurement could be deduced for the example". 

The most punctual composed record of cranial distortion dates to 400 BC in Hippocrates' depiction of the Macrocephali or Long-heads, who were named for their practice of cranial adjustment. 

Paracas skulls 

In the Old World, Huns and Alans are additionally known to have polished comparative cranial deformity. In Late Antiquity (AD 300-600), the East Germanic tribes who were controlled by the Huns, embraced this custom (Gepids, Ostrogoths, Heruli, Rugii and Burgundians). In western Germanic tribes, manufactured skull disfigurements have infrequently been found.