A Digital Facial Approximation Offers a View of the Oldest Known Homo sapiens Fossils
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ScienceAlert reports that a composite skull from the roughly 315,000-year-old Jebel Irhoud remains has been used to estimate a face whose robust features and projecting jaw would still look broadly familiar today.
A skull model combining remains from multiple individuals
According to ScienceAlert, researchers and designer Cícero Moraes built a three-dimensional model from a composite skull whose parts came from multiple individuals in the same archaeological layer. They used modern human CT-based soft-tissue information to estimate facial form. The report says the work was published in Heritage.
The report does not provide a directly comparable earlier facial model. It says no complete skull from one individual was available for this work.
A composite digital skull assembled from several Jebel Irhoud fossils was reportedly used to create a new facial approximation. The result is presented as an estimated face rather than an exact portrait of one person.
Hair and pigmentation are artistic additions
The reconstruction makes the fossil evidence easier to visualize while retaining key limits: no ancient skin or muscle survives to test the result, modern human tissue-thickness data were used, and hair, pigmentation, and facial hair in the color image are artistic additions.
Sources
- ScienceAlertScientists Have Reconstructed The Face of The Oldest Known Homo Sapiens, And It Looks Very FamiliarRead source →