Scientists use skull fragments to reconstruct world’s oldest human face

Scientists have restored the oldest human face in the world. The researchers “revived” a woman who lived 45 thousand years ago. Her skull was found on the territory of the skull – and experts used the measurements of this skull to recreate the woman’s face.

Scientists have recreated the face of perhaps the “oldest man” on Earth, a woman who lived 45,000 years ago, writes the Daily Mail.

Her swarthy features were brought to life by an international team of scientists from Brazil, Australia and Italy using a digital model of her fractured skull.

Fossils discovered in the Czech Republic more than 70 years ago represent only part of a skull, as researchers believe that the woman was eaten by some animal after her death.

While the team did not have access to the ancient skull, they used already recorded measurements and reference images that the researchers had previously used to recreate Tutankhamun’s face this year.

The woman, nicknamed the “Golden Horse,” was one of the first Homo sapiens to settle in Eurasia after our species migrated from Africa, and she had about three percent Neanderthal ancestors in her genome, writes the Daily Mail.

The “Golden Horse” refers to modern humans as this group had very large brains compared to early humans who descended from ape-like ancestors.

The process of using images and recorded measurements is known as face approximation, which is used in forensic research. This is the prediction of a face from the skull without prior knowledge of the actual appearance of the deceased before his death.

Study co-author Cicero Moraes, a Brazilian graphics expert, told Live Science that he and the team used statistics recorded in 2018 by researchers who created skull reconstructions for educational purposes. This technique was used on two CT scans of a modern man and woman, resulting in a digital face.

“What caught our attention the most was the strength of the facial structure, especially the lower jaw,” said Moraes. – When archaeologists found the skull, the first experts who analyzed it thought it was male and it’s easy to see why, in addition to the fact that the skull has characteristics that are very consistent with the male sex of the modern population, which include a “strong” jaw “We see that the Golden Horse’s jaw structure is generally more compatible with Neanderthals.”

The skull was found in nine parts in 1950 in a cave.

Moraes told Live Science that archaeologists believe animals ate the woman’s face after she died.

“This animal could be a wolf or a hyena (both were present in the fauna at the time),” he said. “Despite the fact that the composite skull covers a significant part of the surface (skull + lower jaw), some areas are missing from the structure , primarily part of the nasal bone, part of the upper jaw, left eye socket and left part of the frontal bone.

“In 2018, a multinational team of researchers set to work on a 3D reconstruction of the missing areas using statistical data from a group of 31 skulls, 15 male and 15 female, scanned by computed tomography at the University Hospital Center (CHU) Bordeaux, France , and from the Uche skull, found in Slovakia, dated to 13,100 B.C.’

The team also used 30 other skulls of different origins and genders to fill in gaps in the woman’s description.

The result is a realistic image of a woman with dark curly hair and brown eyes. “We were looking for elements that could only make up the visual structure of the face at a speculative level, as no data was provided on what the color of the skin, hair and eyes would be,” Moraes said.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany announced in 2021 that the Golden Horse lived just 2,000 years after the first interspecies encounters between humans and Neanderthals.

The researchers found that the DNA of this individual and its population is not found in modern humans in either Asia or Europe, where Homo sapiens later colonized.