“The genuine Turkish skull,” says Tylor (Anth., 240),

“is of the broad Tatar form, while the natives of Greece and Asia Minor have oval skulls, which gives the reason why at Constantinople it became the fashion to mould the babies’ skulls round, so that they grew up with the broad head of the conquering race.  Relics of such barbarism linger on in the midst of civilization, and not long ago a French physician surprised the world by the fact that nurses in Normandy were still giving the children’s heads a sugar-loaf shape by bandages and a tight cap, while in Brittany they preferred to press it round.”

Knocking out some of the teeth, or filing them into certain shapes, is another widely prevalent custom, for which it is inadmissible to invoke a monstrous and problematic esthetic taste as long as it can be accounted for on simpler and less disputable grounds, such as vanity, the desire for tribal distinction, or superstition.  Holub found (II., 259), that in one of the Makololo tribes it was customary to break out the top incisor teeth, for the reason that it is “only horses that eat with all their teeth, and that men ought not to eat like horses.”  In other cases it is not contempt for animals but respect for them that accounts for the knocking out of teeth.  Thus Livingstone relates (L.  Tr., II., 120), in speaking of a boy from Lomaine, that “the

upper teeth extracted seemed to say that the tribe have cattle.  The knocking out of the teeth is in imitation of the animals they almost worship.”  The Batokas also give as their reason for knocking out their upper front teeth that they wish to be like oxen.  Livingstone tells us (Zamb., 115), that the Manganja chip their teeth to resemble those of the cat or crocodile:  which suggests totemism, or superstitious respect for an animal chosen as an emblem of a tribe.  That the Australian custom of knocking out the upper front teeth at puberty is part of a religious ceremonial, and not the outcome of a desire to make the boys attractive to the girls, as Westermarck naively assumes (174, 172), is made certain by the details given in Mallery (1888-89, 513-514), including an excerpt from a manuscript by A.W.  Howitt, in which it is pointed out that the humming instrument kuamas, the bull-roarer, “has a sacred character with all the Australian tribes;” and that there are marked on it “two notches, one at each end, representing the gap left in the upper jaw of the novice after his teeth have been knocked out during the rites."[92] But perhaps the commonest motive for altering the teeth is the desire to indicate tribal connections.  “Various tribes,” says Tylor (Anthr. 240), “grind their front teeth to points, or cut them away in angular patterns, so that in Africa and elsewhere a man’s tribe is often known by the cut of his teeth.”