Read Ancient Enemy Online

Authors: Michael McBride

Ancient Enemy (21 page)

BOOK: Ancient Enemy
12.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

In 400 C.E., Hippocrates described a race he called the Macroencephali, or Long-heads, who were so named for their practice of elongating the skulls of their infants by using a wooden press. The Huns, and the Eastern Germanic Tribes they ruled, adopted the same custom nearly a thousand years later.

The Maya and Inca were both known to have deformed the skulls of their children, although not nearly to the same extent as the Paracas tribe of Andean Peru, the discovery of whose remains led to speculation that they were alien in origin.

In North America, the Chinook, Choctaw, and Salish tribes all practiced this custom by strapping the infant’s head to a cradleboard and squishing it with a flat piece of wood.

Isolated instances have been found throughout the Pacific Ocean from Australia to Samoa and Vanuatu to the Hawaiian Islands.

Artificial cranial deformations were performed in the Toulouse region of France well into the twentieth century.

The skull isn’t the only part of the body that people have sought to remodel for aesthetic reasons.

The Sara women of Chad and the Mursi and Suri of Ethiopia insert plates into their lips and stretch the lobes of their ears. Kayan women from Burma wrap brass coils tightly around their necks to force their clavicles and ribs downward in order to create the illusion of an elongated neck. Apanti women from India wear large wooden discs in their nostrils and tribes from South Asia and the Philippines file their teeth to points.

Even now, the practices of body piercing, tattooing, trans- and microdermal implantation, and surgical breast augmentation are almost routine. Not to mention extraocular implants, genital cutting, nipple and tongue splitting, scarification, anal stretching, labia elongation, and, yes, even horn implantation.

The Anasazi

The fact remains that no one knows why the Anasazi abruptly fled first Chaco Canyon, then their cliff dwellings in the Canyons of the Ancients in the Four Corners region of Colorado. Some believe climactic changes caused them to migrate and ultimately integrate into the neighboring tribes, while there is ample evidence that a cataclysmic event caused them to abandon their advanced civilization at the height of its influence. Still other archaeological evidence supports the theories of violence and warfare, and even cannibalism. The truth is we’ll probably never know, but it’s a whole lot of fun to speculate, isn’t it?

 

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

 

Michael McBride is the bestselling author of
Bloodletting
,
Burial Ground
,
F9
,
IMMUN3
,
Innocents Lost
,
Predatory Instinct
,
Remains
,
The Coyote
,
The Event
, and
Vector Borne
. His novella
Snowblind
won the 2012 DarkFuse Readers Choice Award and received Honorable Mention in The Best Horror of the Year. He lives in Avalanche Country with his wife and children. To explore the author’s other works, please visit 
www.michaelmcbride.net
.

 

 

 

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

 

DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.

 

To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at 
www.darkfuse.com
.

Table of Contents

ANCIENT ENEMY

Connect With Us

Other Books by Author

NOVEMBER 8th

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

NOVEMBER 9th

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

NOVEMBER 10th

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

NOVEMBER 12th

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Author’s Notes

About the Author

About the Publisher

BOOK: Ancient Enemy
12.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Immortal Sea by Virginia Kantra
Queen of Ambition by Fiona Buckley
Rocky Road by Susannah McFarlane
The Lad of the Gad by Alan Garner
The Three Evangelists by Fred Vargas
Murder at Union Station by Truman, Margaret
Forgotten Husband by Helen Bianchin
Death at Devil's Bridge by Cynthia DeFelice