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Shrunken heads, or tsantsas, are ceremonial war trophies created by Indigenous Amazonian groups, primarily the Shuar and Achuar people of Ecuador and Peru. They were made as sacred talismans to harness an enemy's spiritual power and prevent revenge, though Western demand later turned them into highly sought-after, commercialized curiosities......
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00:01Shrunken heads.
00:03What are these macabre curiosities?
00:06Where do they come from?
00:08How were they made?
00:12Now scientists are using advanced forensic technology
00:16and DNA analysis to find out who these people really were.
00:22The DNA analysis has revealed that they were definitely from the same family
00:27and they might have been brothers.
00:30Anthropologists are discovering the science of head shrinking.
00:34The ability to preserve a head for over a hundred years is really quite incredible.
00:39And putting their research into practice.
00:42Right now I'm actually removing the skin from the skull.
00:48That's the first stage of head shrinking.
00:51They're uncovering a dark tale of ancient ritual and Victorian obsession.
00:57Exploration and exploitation.
01:01Forgery and murder.
01:04To reveal the secrets of the shrunken heads.
01:18In the 19th century, a gruesome curiosity captured the public imagination.
01:25And created an obsession for these exotic novelties.
01:32Decapitated human heads shrunk to a fraction of their original size.
01:38Shrunken heads were sought after because they were really rare.
01:42They were really macabre.
01:43They were so far removed from our own culture.
01:47And therefore they were the height of the trophy in the oddity collection for a 19th century collector.
01:55Shrunken heads have long been viewed as almost like freak show ornaments that would be put in displays or in
02:02even private collections for people to stare at.
02:05Without anyone really acknowledging that this was once a living, breathing individual.
02:11There are thousands of shrunken heads in museums around the world.
02:16Some on display, others locked away.
02:20And the shocking truth is, most of these are real human heads.
02:25Where did they come from?
02:28How were they made?
02:29And what's the true story behind this strange and disturbing phenomenon?
02:35Now scientists can finally answer these questions.
02:39Using DNA, forensic science and advanced computer modelling.
02:44Among them is Dr. Tobias Holton, an anthropologist specialising in facial anatomy.
02:52The intention of our forensic investigation is that we can actually discover the identity of the individual.
02:59That it's not just the so-called specimen that's hidden behind a glass cabinet.
03:05But actually a living, breathing person that once existed.
03:08Who are they?
03:10Where did they reside?
03:12And how did they land up as a shrunken head?
03:17The story begins deep in the Amazon rainforest.
03:21And with a single tribe.
03:23The Shua.
03:28The tribe's ancestral homeland lies amongst the tributaries of the Amazon River.
03:34In the remote jungle of Ecuador.
03:39With a reputation as fearsome warriors,
03:41the Shua were the only South American indigenous people never to have been conquered by the Span Empire.
03:50Over thousands of years, they mastered the macabre art of head shrinking.
03:55Before it was banned in the 1960s.
03:58The Shua called these shrunken heads, Sansa.
04:03Felipe Sencus is a former president of the Shua Federation.
04:10The Shua is a civilization of their own civilization.
04:15The Shua is an identity, aistant from our own Shua.
04:19This was a luck.
04:21This meant triumph, power, pride, pride.
04:26These weren't trophies of war.
04:29They were more than simply symbolic.
04:31In a world in which the spirits of the dead were as real as the living,
04:36shrunken heads served an important practical purpose.
04:48It was not about the physical item.
04:56It filled purely a practical spiritual function.
05:03At Philadelphia's Muta Museum, curator and forensic anthropologist Anna Dodie studied
05:10Sansa and the Shwa belief system.
05:12The Shwa believe in spirits.
05:15They believed that the enemy, the spirit of their enemy could still harm them even after
05:20death and that they had to take preventative measures.
05:23So by taking the head of their enemy and by creating these very special Sansas, they could
05:30actually effectively seal the spirit of their defeated enemy in the head.
05:37Each genuine shrunken head shares the same distinctive characteristics, charcoal darkened skin and sealed
05:45eyes and mouth.
05:47The careful and deliberate closure of the eyes and mouth provides a clue to the shrunken
05:52head's spiritual purpose.
05:55The eyes can be sewn shut, the nose is sometimes plugged shut and most importantly, it's the mouth.
06:01The mouth is either pegged shut with very specific types of pegs or it's actually sewn shut.
06:08And that's very important because you want to seal these orifices up so that the soul or the spirit of
06:14the defeated enemy cannot escape.
06:20The head was strung on a cord and worn by the man who'd taken it.
06:25The killer gradually absorbed the captured soul's power.
06:29When this was complete, the head was thrown away.
06:33Shrunken heads were sacred items, but not permanent ones.
06:39The Shuar weren't really interested in the actual physical head.
06:43They were interested in the process, which involved trapping a vengeful soul and using that power to bring good fortune
06:50to themselves.
06:51And actually, the heads had a shelf life of one to two years, after which time the Shuar would typically
06:56throw the heads out.
06:58But there are hundreds of shrunken heads in museums and collections around the world.
07:04So where did they come from?
07:06Are they genuine Shuar shrunken heads or clever fakes?
07:11Medical historian Dr. Lindsay Fitzharris wants to discover their secrets.
07:16A lot of people, when they visit a museum and they see a shrunken head, the first question they ask
07:21is, how was it made?
07:22But very few people ask, how did it get there in the first place?
07:29A lot of people ask, how did it get there in the first place?
07:29Fitzharris believes that finding out how and why these people ended up in museums will take investigators a step closer
07:37to discovering their identity.
07:40She's travelled to the State Ethnological Museum in Warsaw, Poland, where the DNA of several shrunken heads has been analysed.
07:50Magdalena Gudejko is the collection's curator.
07:54She's identified two heads that bear a striking similarity.
07:59So the DNA analysis has revealed that they were from Ecuador, they were from the same tribe, and most probably
08:06in the same family.
08:09They might have been fighting together with a common enemy, and killed at the same time.
08:15Traditionally, the Shuar discarded shrunken heads after a year.
08:20But the fact that these two heads still here, one hundred and fifths later, is a clue that around the
08:26middle of the 19th century, something stopped the Shuar from dis-shreds.
08:30And changed their world forever.
08:39Since the Spanish conquest of Ecuador in the 16th century, the Shuar had successfully repelled invaders.
08:47But in the 1840s, Western explorers and traders began to penetrate the Shuar's remote territory, in search of the rubber
08:55trees that grew in the jungle.
08:58Here, they were captivated by the Shuar's shrunken heads.
09:03Because these tiny human heads appealed to a gruesome Victorian mindset.
09:09You have to remember that this is a very different culture from ours.
09:13This is a time of public executions, and this is a time when the criminal will be hanged and publicly
09:18dissected,
09:19and his skin will be used to bind a book about his crime.
09:22So, the shrunken heads very much fit into that macabre trinkets that people were trying to get their hands on.
09:30The stranger, the weirder, the better for their collections.
09:35From the mid-19th century onwards, the Shuar stopped discarding the heads, and began to sell them to travelers and
09:42traders.
09:44This may have been the fate of the two warriors, made as genuine ceremonial shrunken heads, then sold on to
09:52traders.
09:54News of these gruesome curios began to spread across Europe and North America.
10:00Collectors, scientists, circus impresarios, and freak show entertainers all wanted a shrunken head.
10:08People in the 19th century traveled all over the world at this time, looking for strange and unusual objects for
10:14their curiosity cabinets.
10:17By the 1850s, an ancient ritual had become an international trade.
10:24It was the beginning of a terrible new chapter in the long history of the Shuar.
10:55No longer simply selling discarded heads.
10:58The Shuar began killing to supply the western demand for shrunken heads.
11:04Their jungle homeland erupted into bloodshed.
11:10Nothing was sacred.
11:12Nobody was safe.
11:14Not even the dead.
11:25Shrunken heads.
11:28Macabre curiosities that were once living, breathing people.
11:34Now scientists are using forensic technology and DNA to reveal the secrets of these shrunken heads.
11:42Whilst anthropologists are investigating the culture that made them.
11:49In Warsaw, Poland, medical historian Dr. Lindsay Fitzharris is investigating a collection of heads in the State Ethnological Museum.
12:00And one has captured her attention.
12:04As you can see, the ear is a lot different.
12:08It doesn't have as many details as they have.
12:11It doesn't resemble as much as human ear.
12:16This is not a human head.
12:18It's a clever fake made of animal hide that was stretched and molded to appear human.
12:25So we can be quite sure that it's made of an animal skin.
12:30But the Shwa tribe were head shrinkers, not leather workers.
12:34So if they didn't make this head, who did?
12:39In the mid-19th century, the Amazon's rubber trees and mineral riches brought traders, miners and missionaries to the region.
12:48Settlements sprung up in or near Shwa territory.
12:52The fake head suggests some of these colonial settlers wanted a piece of the lucrative trade in shrunken heads.
12:59Making a fast buck selling fake heads to eager traders and explorers.
13:05A lot of collectors were being duped and paying a lot of money for essentially what was a fake shrunken
13:11head at this time.
13:12And they were being sold, you know, incredible stories that were attached to these objects to go along with them.
13:18Another head in the museum's collection came with exactly this kind of tall tale.
13:24Could this be another fake head?
13:27The head was acquired by the museum in 1950.
13:31The information that they gave us was that it was a male shaman who was trying to cure a child
13:38of one of his tribesmen.
13:41But since he couldn't do it, the father of the child killed the shaman and took his head.
13:46That's what we thought during a very long time.
13:51In 2016, the museum analyzed the head's DNA.
13:56The analysis revealed this was not made of animal skin.
14:00It was a real human head.
14:03But something was wrong.
14:05The DNA analysis said that this is a female head, not a male.
14:10It's a shocking revelation.
14:13Genuine ceremonial shrunken heads are always male.
14:18Because the Shwa shrank heads to stop the soul of a slain warrior from taking revenge.
14:25And in Shwa society, women were never warriors.
14:31Shrunken heads were traditionally made of male warriors.
14:36Women, on the other hand, were not expected to present the same threat at all.
14:42So the only reason to shrink a woman's head would be to satisfy the Victorian demand for morbid curios.
14:50She wasn't a victim of tribal conflict, but of cold-blooded murder.
14:56The killing started to increase in order to supply for the demand.
15:02So it was most probably an innocent female.
15:06This woman's death had nothing to do with ceremony and everything to do with money.
15:13This is a commercial shrunken head.
15:18Commercial heads were created just for trade, just as a commodity.
15:23There was no spiritual aspect connected to it.
15:28By the late 19th century, in the quest for ever stranger curiosities,
15:33human heads had become commodities.
15:38And the Shwa was central to this bloody trade, as victims and perpetrators.
15:45Since the Shwa knew that the land has value,
15:52now it has been generated in the communities of insecurity.
15:59It's a threat.
16:02It's a threat.
16:03The Shwa prided themselves on their fearsome reputation.
16:08They fought amongst themselves, clan versus clan,
16:12and against neighboring tribes, using blowpipes and spears.
16:16But the Victorian fascination with shrunken heads
16:20turned these localized skirmishes into full-blown war.
16:25Because as the trade escalated in the late 19th century,
16:29instead of buying shrunken heads with cash,
16:32Europeans began trading with a deadly new currency.
16:36Guns.
16:38This allowed the Shwa people to collect heads at a greater pace
16:42and a greater number.
16:44And the Shwa began killing people indiscriminately
16:47in order to meet European demand.
16:53The guns triggered an explosion in violence.
16:59As a vicious circle of supply and demand,
17:02blame and retaliation spiraled out of control.
17:10So it does seem that the more we dig deep into the history
17:13of the head shrinking trade,
17:15it becomes more and more grim and macabre and unpleasant
17:19and removed from its original meaning.
17:23Two genuine ceremonial shrunken heads.
17:26A fake made of animal skin
17:28and the shrunken head of a woman made for commercial purposes.
17:33The four heads in Warsaw tell an increasingly disturbing story
17:37of a descent from ancient ritual to fakery and murder.
17:42But this is just the beginning.
17:46Now anthropologist and facial anatomy expert Dr. Tobias Holton
17:51wants to delve deeper into the secrets of shrunken heads.
17:56To retrace their journey from Europe
18:00back to where the story began.
18:03The heart of South America and the Amazon basin.
18:08His destination?
18:09The historic colonial city of Cuenca in Ecuador.
18:14Here on the edge of Shwa territory,
18:16he wants to discover the secrets of shrunken heads.
18:23I want to get to understand the whole custom, the people behind it,
18:27as well as the victims of the head shrinking.
18:32The city's museum is home to South America's largest collection of shrunken heads.
18:40Houlton hopes these heads, so close to the Shwa homeland,
18:44will hold more clues about how they were made and who they were.
18:48But he's about to discover they're not what he expects.
18:53With specialist imaging technology used by crime scene investigators,
18:57he examines the heads in forensic detail.
19:03Infrared reflectology captures infrared wavelengths beyond the range of visible light
19:08to reveal details invisible to the naked eye.
19:12The benefit of using this is that it will give me a nice defined image of the skin
19:18and give me a detailed idea of any changes in the skin pattern
19:24which will help identify if this is a ceremonial sensor or a commercial shrunken head.
19:31It's the first time this technology has been used to examine the heads in the museum's collection.
19:38Revealing to curator Tamara Landivar details she's never seen before.
19:45And almost immediately, Houlton sees there's something strange about this shrunken head.
19:52There's no doubt it's human, but a genuine ceremonial shrunken head should have smooth hairless skin.
20:00Evidence that the head had been prepared using the traditional schwa technique of ironing the skin with a heated rock.
20:08The images reveal the skin on this head is thicker and rougher than expected.
20:14The individual that was processing this head didn't actually iron the skin in quite the same way as the schwa.
20:21This subtle detail, invisible to the naked eye, suggests this is not a genuine ceremonial shrunken head.
20:30I think it's most probably a commercial shrunken head.
20:35So if this head wasn't made by the schwa, who did make it?
20:42By the 1880s, the western mania for shrunken heads had triggered a twisted gold rush.
20:49And this treasure wasn't mined from the earth.
20:52It was made from human flesh.
20:55A single shrunken head could be exchanged for a gun or machete, or sold for between $5 and $25.
21:03Not much for a human life, but a small fortune in 19th century Ecuador.
21:09With serious money to be made, the schwa began killing to meet western demand.
21:15Tribal warriors became commercial headhunters.
21:20And it wasn't long before outsiders joined the deadly treasure hunt.
21:26In the towns and settlements on the edge of the jungle, colonial settlers soon learnt the ancient art of head
21:33shrinking.
21:34For us, both the European and the schwa, who practice this,
21:40are repudiable for us.
21:48By the late 19th century, the schwa and colonial settlers were all making shrunken heads to sell.
21:55But Halton's infrared images reveal even this wasn't enough to satisfy the insatiable demand for these gruesome collectors' items.
22:05Because on the skin of another head in the museum's collection, he's discovered strange raised patches.
22:13Evidence of an even darker chapter in the story of shrunken heads.
22:19As you can see, this area here looks like that might be a lesion that had developed during decomposition.
22:28After death, tissue begins to break down, causing skin to discolor and disintegrate.
22:35And that means this man wasn't killed in tribal warfare.
22:38He wasn't killed to fuel the trade in shrunken heads.
22:42He was already dead.
22:44It looks like the timescale between the person's death when the head was taken and then shrunk,
22:53you know, is probably a larger timescale than what you'd expect to see with a ceremonial sansa.
22:59The schwa shrunk their victims' heads immediately after death,
23:03to prevent their vengeful spirit from escaping.
23:07But this head had started to decompose.
23:11The heads could have been allowed to decompose over a period of time.
23:16It can mean only one thing.
23:21This head was stolen from a body and shrunk for commercial purposes.
23:27By the late 19th century, it seems a new kind of criminal had joined the feeding frenzy.
23:33Body snatchers.
23:35But where did they snatch the bodies from?
23:39Halton thinks one head in the museum's collection holds a clue.
23:43This is an interesting one.
23:45The wavy hair and the thick beard, the full exposure of the upper eyelids, eyelashes, the very fine suturing,
23:53is probably produced from a European individual.
23:56This man was of European origin.
24:01Shockingly, it's not a unique discovery.
24:06Investigations into other collections across the globe have revealed similar, unsettling results.
24:13Reasonably certain that this one is a non-ceremonial shrunken head.
24:19It is made predominantly for the tourist trade.
24:22The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia has been carrying out a survey of shrunken heads held in collections across the United
24:29States.
24:29They've discovered that even genuine fake ceremonial heads from South America are not always what they seem.
24:38You can see the hair is shorter.
24:40If you look very closely, he's got a mustache.
24:44His hair is lighter in color.
24:46And also, the hair is falling out.
24:49This was made with a different technique than what the schwar would have used.
24:53I think it's actually of a person of Western origin.
24:57The Western heads discovered in Philadelphia and Ecuador reveal Europeans living in South America were not immune from the trade
25:07fueled by their fellow Victorians.
25:10Living in or near schwar territory in the late 19th or early 20th century, these men may have been missionaries
25:18or traders.
25:20And that made them an ideal target for body snatchers.
25:26European heads would have likely been used because they were readily accessible within hospital mortuaries or in cemeteries.
25:34So they were easy to access by those living in colonial towns and villages, unlike the schwar who were living
25:41out in the Amazon rainforest.
25:43A number of Europeans were actually purchasing heads that they thought were from the exotic schwar culture deep in the
25:50Amazon, only to actually be holding onto a head that was actually shrunk of a European.
25:56The investigation is uncovering a sinister story of headhunting and body snatching.
26:03But just when Halton thought he'd seen it all, there's worse to come.
26:18The collection of shrunken heads in the Cuenca Museum in Ecuador has revealed many unsettling secrets.
26:25But in the vaults, kept well away from public view, is a truly disturbing item that marks a terrible tipping
26:34point.
26:34As the demand for shrunken heads drove people to commit ever more desperate acts.
26:41It's the head of a child.
26:43This is actually a rather shocking shrunken head look at.
26:47The fact that he had about six years of age.
26:54To satisfy collectors' appetites for ever more, ever stranger shrunken heads, this child was decapitated and turned into a commodity.
27:05It's really an absolute travesty that a child should be used this way to earn money and profits.
27:13It's just really quite disgraceful that somebody should do this to a child.
27:20The fakes, the innocent men and women, even the dead, weren't enough to satisfy the Western appetite for these macabre
27:29collectors' items.
27:31And so the headhunters broke the final taboo.
27:35They began killing children.
27:38When headhunting became particularly popular, especially referring to the 1880s, women, children, absolutely everyone would be killed in order to
27:51procure a sufficient number of heads to shrink, to sell in the markets.
27:58This indiscriminate slaughter was a world away from the original purpose of head shrinking, to prevent a warrior's soul from
28:05taking revenge on the killer.
28:07For us, it's very indiscriminate.
28:12It's very indiscriminate that, for the foreign money, there have been killed by children and children.
28:26It's very indiscriminate that, for the foreign money, there have been killed by children and children.
28:37For the victims and perpetrators, the consequences of this twisted trade were catastrophic.
28:44The proud Shua tribe, the only indigenous South American people to remain unconquered by the Spanish conquistadors, was pushed to
28:55the brink of extinction.
28:57For those victims, there was no limit, if they were killed by one, and if they were found others, they
29:05would kill them.
29:07The persons would be menores, killed them.
29:10Then the families, there was a danger of making the Shua tribe than us.
29:18But as extinction loomed, attitudes began to change, because not all the Westerners who
29:25ventured into the jungle came in search of shrunken heads.
29:30Some came to stop the bloodshed.
29:34Christian missionaries preached an end to violence and headhunting.
29:55Gradually, Victorian obsession turned to modern repulsion.
30:00From the 1930s onwards, the trade in shrunken heads declined until it was eventually banned
30:06by the Ecuadorian government in the 1960s.
30:10But those who didn't lose their lives lost their reputation.
30:15Unfortunately, it was a stereotype that Shuar's culture was known as a savage, cannibals.
30:24Now Dr. Tobias Holton wants to set the record straight, to help restore the Shuar's reputation
30:31as a proud, ancient people, by reassessing the science of head shrinking.
30:38Yes, it was a product of warfare, and warfare is never a positive thing, but the science
30:45that went behind the head shrinking practice was quite astonishing, and the ability to preserve
30:51a head for over a hundred years within an Amazon rainforest condition is really quite incredible.
30:59How did the Shuar shrink a human head to a fraction of its original size?
31:04And how have the heads that were made to be discarded after just a year survived for over
31:10a hundred?
31:11To find out, Holton needs to understand exactly what happens when a head is shrunk.
31:18And to do that, he must learn the ancient craft of head shrinking.
31:23For Holton, it will be the culmination of a decades-long fascination with this gruesome,
31:28but frequently misunderstood, custom.
31:32My earliest experience of witnessing a shrunken head must have been when I was in school age,
31:37near enough nine, ten years old, and I remember walking into a museum and seeing this specimen
31:43on display, and immediately questions were ringing in my head.
31:48Who produced these incredible specimens?
31:51How did they do it?
31:52Why did they do it?
31:54More recently, Holton has been captivated by one head above all others.
32:00The shrunken head of a man, given to the McManus Museum in Dundee, Scotland in 1923.
32:09Now Holton hopes to learn the ancient art of head shrinking, and use his findings in a
32:14unique experiment.
32:16He wants to discover the effects of the shrinking process.
32:20Then, with this information, he will attempt to reverse-engineer the process that turned
32:26this man into a shrunken head.
32:29To create a computer-generated reconstruction of the man's face as he looked in life.
32:36I want to go ahead and reconstruct a shrunken head to its original full human form, and this
32:43is essentially to raise the dignity of that individual and remind everyone that this was
32:48actually a human being.
32:50The trade in heads was banned over half a century ago, but the physical process of making a
32:56ceremonial head has been handed down by word of mouth to today's tribal elders.
33:02This is the information Holton needs to undertake his ambitious facial reconstruction.
33:08It's critical to actually identify how the head shrinks over this process, so that I actually
33:14know when it comes to performing a reconstruction on a head, what features change the most and
33:19why.
33:21Shwa tribal elder Nawak Ensakayap Pedro is one of the few people alive today who know how to
33:29make a ceremonial sansa.
33:33For Holton, this meeting is a unique opportunity to discover the secrets of the sansa at first-hand.
33:52The original purpose of the sansa was to break the cycle of violence between rival clans and
33:58tribes.
33:58The Shwa believed possessing their victim's head would prevent him from returning to seek
34:12revenge.
34:14Nawak shares his ancient knowledge, providing a blow-by-blow account of how to shrink a human
34:20head.
34:26As Holton listens, Nawak explains the process in detail.
34:32How to remove the skull, eyes and tongue.
34:36How to treat the skin and how to dry it out.
34:47And throughout the entire process, the killer fasted to protect himself against his victim's
34:53malign influence.
34:55Once the head was shrunk, the warrior regained his power by drinking an hallucinogenic potion.
35:15This unique insight reveals the ritual and technical complexity of making a genuine ceremonial shrunken
35:23head.
35:24To actually preserve a human head within a hot and humid environment is something that
35:29doesn't come naturally.
35:30So the intelligence and sophistication that they had to practice in order to mummify these
35:35heads is quite astonishing.
35:39Holton's trip to Ecuador has given him step-by-step instructions on how to shrink a head.
35:46Now he must put his knowledge into practice.
35:50His goal?
35:52To create a shrunken head.
35:55With smooth, relatively hairless skin, a pig's head provides the closest analogy to a human head.
36:02So I'm just taking dimensions across the face and this will act as a means of comparison, following head shrinking,
36:09to get a general idea of how much the head's reduced.
36:12Using the techniques learned in Ecuador, Holton begins the gruesome process.
36:18First, he removes the one thing that won't shrink, the skull.
36:22What most people don't realise is that the schwa had to remove the skull in order to make shrinkage possible.
36:28So that's the reason for removing the skin from the head.
36:33This is pretty much what the schwa would have done when shrinking a head.
36:39Next, three wooden pins seal the mouth shut.
36:43Amongst the schwa, it was essential that the mouth was well and truly fastened, because that was believed to be
36:50the central orifice.
36:51That's what the enemy spirits would escape from.
36:56He uses thick twine to sew the eyes shut.
37:00So the significance of stitching the eyelids shut was that it was a means of trapping the enemy spirits within
37:08the head.
37:10With the mouth and eyes sealed, Holton places the head into boiling water and leaves it for an hour.
37:18Like human skin, the pig skin is made up of collagen fibres, and when these fibres are exposed to temperatures
37:25above 145 degrees, they contract, causing the skin to shrink.
37:37To dry the skin and shrink the head even further, Holton fills it with hot pebbles and sand.
37:44This absorbs any remaining moisture.
37:50Finally, he irons the skin.
37:53This is essentially the final touches of the head shrinking process.
37:58What I'm doing is taking a hot, flat pebble and ironing the outer face with it.
38:04And what this is doing is helping me mould the skin and dry it out entirely from the outside.
38:10By the end of the process, the pig's head has shrunk by a third.
38:17Now he's seen firsthand how the shrinking process changes ahead, Holton can embark on the final part of his quest.
38:25The next stage is to take all the information that I've got so far and actually go through the process
38:31of reconstructing the face of a shrunken head to revive the warrior that once existed.
38:38Using cutting edge computer modelling technology, Holton will attempt something that's never been done before.
38:44To reverse the head shrinking process and discover the man behind the shrunken head.
39:02On a mission to reveal the secrets of shrunken heads, facial anatomy expert Dr. Tobias Holton has discovered how to
39:11shrink a head.
39:13Now he's ready to reverse it and reveal how one victim would have looked in life.
39:21It's not going to right the wrongs of the past, but at least we're bringing back the human being from
39:27what is essentially looked upon as a museum artefact or a cultural specimen.
39:38Holton has travelled to Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.
39:45Here, at the renowned Facelab, facial reconstruction expert Professor Caroline Wilkinson has given a face to thousands of John and
39:54Jane Does and helped solve hundreds of murders and archaeological mysteries.
40:00But this could be her toughest case yet.
40:04Usually, with the facial reconstruction process, what we're doing is we're looking at the structure of the skull and the
40:10details of the bones of the skull to tell us about the soft tissue features.
40:16But shrunken heads have no skulls. The skull is removed to allow the head to shrink.
40:22In this case, since we don't have a skull, we're going to use a template skull, which is a typical
40:28skull from that part of the world of a similar age and gender to our target individual.
40:34Using a template skull is standard practice in forensic and archaeological facial reconstructions, where part of the skull is missing
40:43or badly damaged.
40:46It won't provide a perfect likeness, but it's the best solution with the available evidence.
40:52We can use that template to unfold and inflate that shrunken head so that we can build the facial features
41:00and slowly build up the facial appearance of the individual.
41:04Holton's analysis has established shrunken heads are, on average, a fifth of their original size.
41:11So to reverse the process, the head must be scaled up to five times its current size.
41:18You need a bit of growth on this cranium, don't you?
41:21Yeah.
41:22The nose and mouth require careful attention.
41:26The mouth has become distorted by being pinned shut.
41:30And without a skull to hold it in place, the nose has retracted upwards as it shrunk.
41:36To correct these exaggerations, Holton turns to early photographs of Schwa tribesmen as a reference point.
41:44If we push the mouth back in, and then this is pretty much there around the top.
41:49Yes.
41:50Sure.
41:51Holton uses tissue depth markers based on data from average indigenous South Americans to digitally reinstate the tissue, fat and
42:01muscle destroyed during the shrinking process.
42:05And give the face back its shape.
42:10With the facial structure in place, skin texture and typical Schwa body ornamentation can be added.
42:17Bamboo tubes decorated with red and yellow toucan feathers pierce the ears.
42:23We can use cutting edge CGI techniques for adding the skin and the hair and the other realistic details of
42:29the face.
42:30Finally, the program renders the fine details and the process is complete.
42:38At least a hundred years after his death, 5,000 miles from his birthplace, a Schwa warrior stares out from
42:47the screen.
42:49Is this the face you expected?
42:51Well, it suddenly looks like a Schwa warrior.
42:54It does?
42:55So yeah, it's impressive.
42:56It looks amazing.
42:57Yeah.
42:58From Amazonian warrior to Victorian collector's item and back.
43:22The more we can learn about their traditions and their way of life helps us to better understand them.
43:28They're more than just head shrinkers.
43:31That's one very small element of their identity.
43:36You know, they're botanists.
43:37They're horticulturalists.
43:38They understand their environments.
43:40They know how to survive in the Amazon rainforest.
43:45At this time, working Nazism is a murder.
43:49We already see it like aда, it's still sacred, it's still not of cultural.
43:56That is death by the Ecuadorian laws.
44:00Now, we live and not inargent today.
44:04We're going to live and make this don't in nothing.
44:06How but not in the life, in peace.
44:12the story of shrunken heads and of this man is more than the story of macabre museum pieces
44:20it's the story of a society of victims who were also perpetrators
44:29of exploitation devastation and survival
44:46next tonight jack the ripper the missing evidence and next week betony hughes crosses the rubicon
44:52as she continues to take on the roman empire new eight days that made rome returns next friday night
44:59at nine
44:59you