The Garland of Hyperbeings: Did Gods Walk on Earth? With the companion study "Do Ancient Faces Copy the People They Show?" (version 2)

Greek and Indian art both depict gods as idealised, superhuman humans. This record publishes the first edition of The Garland of Hyperbeings, which proposes that the "hyperbeing" is a stylistic skin laid over an older chain, human → elements → gods → depiction, and tests what can be tested. It traces Greek–Indian contact after Alexander through treaty, coinage, inscription and sculpture; specifies a non-parametric, leave-one-tradition-out measurement design validated on simulated data; and measures the artistic style offset directly on six depictions of known people compared with their own skulls. Makers narrowed the nose by about 22% (4 of 4 cases measured) and, more weakly, widened the eyes by about 9% (5 of 5), and kings shown as gods were idealised no more than ordinary people in these few cases. The paper also documents the same chain running today in Tamil Nadu's temples to living film stars, and closes on what measurement cannot reach.The record also contains version 2 of the companion calibration study, "Do Ancient Faces Copy the People They Show?", which supersedes version 1 (10.5281/zenodo.23154875) and adds a Roman-period child mummy (Munich ÄS 1307). Its data and code are included (Python; seed 20261004).