Cerne Abbas Giant / Antibiotics / Skull Sculpting
The wonderful Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset, England is somehow still succeeding in his mission. The 180ft ancient chalk hill figure looks like a caveman with a club, but the key imagery is his erect penis, which of course proves that the site was used for fertility rituals, according to experts. Well, if more proof was needed, even without many rituals on the hill, local women are having more babies than anywhere else in Britain!
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Lancet Infectious Diseases has reported that within a couple of generations we could well be without the modern marvels of antibiotics:
Bacteria are great survivors. The biggest threat now, experts believe, is from multi-drug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria, such as NDM 1-producing enterobacteriaceae and an enzyme called KPC which has spread in the US (and in Israel and Greece) which also gives bacteria resistance to the carbapenems, the most powerful group of antibiotics we (once) had.
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Add the Aborigines of Australia to the list of cultures that did or do practice skull modifications in infants. They were doing it 10,000 years ago (but not now), at a time when their bodies were larger as well. My still evolving opinion is that a historical human species held in high esteem had elongated heads, and while some examples of such are from that species, many were created by regular humans in the hope that their children would be just as great. Such skulls were found in places such as Nazca. Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten had an elongated skull (proven when his body was exhumed)… and so did his son Tutankhamun.
