Researchers from Sweden assert that Viking women had plastic surgery

Researchers have found evidence of cosmetic surgery performed on Viking women in Sweden a millennium ago. Three enlarged skulls were discovered by a German study team; these changes were most likely made during the women’s first year of life, when their skulls were still flexible and supple. According to the experts, it’s probable that the Vikings grew their skulls longer as a symbol of beauty and prestige.

For the first time, skull malformations have been linked to Vikings; before, they had only been associated with Mesoamerican, Native American, and Eurasian societies. Skull defects were frequent in the Black Sea area. The co-leader of the trip, Matthias Toplak, told Atlas Obscura, “We do not know where these three women grew up and where their heads became deformed.” “It is unclear how they returned to Gotland and whether their heads became deformed in their early childhood, for example, in the Black Sea region,” he said.

The researchers hypothesize that during the first year of life, when the bones were still malleable enough to be changed by wrapping bandages around the head of the child to extend the skull, the women’s skulls were most likely modified. But the adoption of more severe methods by the Vikings, such as weights or harnesses, could have had an impact on their cognitive development.

Although the director of the pediatric plastic surgery department, Jesse Goldstein, said that the more drastic method would have devastating effects, the researchers made it clear that they could not establish if this was the case based just on the skulls.

“If this technique was applied, it might have had detrimental effects on brain development, particularly if it occurred during early childhood,” he informed Atlas. But he also said, “It’s difficult to say for sure.”

The artificial cranial deformation (ACD), according to the researchers, was most likely used to set the ladies apart from other people and indicate that they had traveled.

In the study, the researchers said that “the human body is and represents a medium of communication” and that it is capable of producing communication in an organized, functionally sophisticated way. It is much more probable that the ladies were “seen as evidence of extensive trade contacts and thus a sign of influence and success in trade,” Toplak told LiveScience, despite the possibility that they utilized ACD as a beauty symbol.

DNA analysis was done by researchers from the University of Münster in Germany and the Haithabu Viking Museum to establish that the skulls belong to the Scandinavian Viking Age and were found on the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea.