As they stormed out of the Russian steppes into Roman territory in western Eurasia in the fourth century CE, the Huns were, it is generally accepted, a scary sight.
The fear they induced was not merely because of the way they were dressed, how they were armed, or the ruthless way they crushed all who attempted to oppose them. It was more than that: many, perhaps most, of them were physically deformed, their skulls unnaturally huge and protuberant.
They looked, in fact, frighteningly weird. They were warriors from nightmares.
The Huns practised cranial modification. They applied sustained pressure to the heads of their children – starting from very shortly after birth – to change the shape of their skulls, pushing them in and making them longer.
In a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, however, researchers Varsha Pilbrow and Peter Mayall from Australia’s University of Melbourne show that the invaders were far from unique in their taste for stretching, squeezing and binding crania.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/archaeology/deformed-skulls-were-badges-of-belonging/