Shrinking the Mystery of Tsantsa Identification: Hair Analysis of Shrunken Heads from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONTribes in South America, such as the Jivaro, were historically known to perform shrinking of human heads as part of their war rituals. Although authentic shrunken heads (tsantsas) are of human origin, imitation tsantsas were later fabricated using animal or synthetic materials. Numerous tsantsas are held in museum collections worldwide, including five in the Anthropology Collection at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS). A previous analysis of the tsantsas curated at the DMNS suggests that two specimens may be imitations.GOALSThe purpose of this study was to microscopically evaluate hairs from each of the five tsantsas in the Anthropology Collection at DMNS, and test the hypothesis that hairs from each specimen are human in origin.METHODSFive hairs from five different areas of the head (frontal, right and left temporal, vertex, occipital) were obtained for a total of 25 hairs per specimen. The hairs were mounted for microscopic analysis by researchers blinded to the origin of the samples. Using a brightfield microscope at 40x, images were collected using the Amscope image capture software and analyzed using ImageJ. The following qualitative characteristics were scored and compared to human norms: hair color, medulla features, cuticle thickness, pigment granule distribution, and the presence of scales. Measurements of hair shaft width and medulla width were also recorded for each hair and compared to human reference values for global populations.RESULTSThe qualitative analysis revealed that all of the hairs exhibited typical human characteristics. For each of the specimens, mean hair shaft and medulla width values were mostly within the normal range for human hair. However, a few exceptions were observed: 68% of sampled hairs from one specimen exhibited a medulla wider than expected for human hair, where the medulla is typically less than one‐third of the shaft width, and in another specimen, 72% of sampled hairs had shaft widths below the normal human range of 60–120um.CONCLUSIONWhen considering results from both the qualitative and quantitative analyses, the hairs from each of the DMNS tsantsas are likely to be human in origin. Previous analyses of the facial characteristics of the DMNS specimens suggested that two specimens may be imitations rather than authentic tsantsas. However, the hairs sampled from the two potential imitations appear to be human. It is possible that the genuine human hairs were manually imbedded into the scalp of the fabricated tsantsas; closer inspection of the internal scalp may provide insight. DNA analysis is needed to confirm the human origin of the tsantsas.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.