With the help of technology, it is becoming easier for archaeologists to show how the human body has evolved throughout history, because due to the remains of bodies and skulls that have been found for thousands of years, they can compare the evolution and physical change that people have had.
For example, there is a group of scientists who recently showed what the face of the oldest woman in the world looks like, based on her skull, which was found in 1881 and, according to studies, it is believed that the person lived 31 thousand years ago.
The person in charge of finding the skull of this woman, who was initially believed to be a man, was the Austro-Hungarian archaeologist Josef Szombathy, who found the piece in the main cave of the archaeological site of Mladeč, a town in the Czech Republic, skull that is considered one of the Homo sapiens oldest in history.
The technology allowed comparisons of the characteristics with other fossils found at the site and revealed that it was a woman who lived during the Aurignacian, part of the Upper Paleolithic period, and who died around the age of 17, approximately 31,000 years ago.
The skull had been incomplete since it was found, with part of the lower jaw missing, so the researchers used virtual donors to see what type of face was best suited for facial recovery. After testing several prototypes, it was found that the person with whom he had the most affinity was with the faces of Asian and Brazilian people, with great compatibility in the part of the eyes and nose with this type of individual.
We had to reconstruct the skull and for that we used average and projection statistical data extracted from about 200 CT scans of modern humans and from archaeological excavations belonging to different population groups, including Europeans, Africans and Asians. This allowed us to project missing regions of the human face.
– Cicero Moraes, graphic expert and co-author of the book ‘A Live Science’
After several attempts deforming bones and soft tissue until they found the face they wanted to approximate, the scientists created two versions of prototypes to show what the face of what is considered the “oldest woman in the world” would look like. In one image they represented her without hair, with her eyes closed and in a gray scale, while in the second, they showed her with hair, eyes open, in color and with additional details, such as facial hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, illustration which makes it look much more expressive.
The simple image illustrates a more scientific approach and the composite image a more artistic approach. The first offers a volumetry based on data and real anatomy and the second creates a popular symbol, which works as a decoy so that any interested party can create an empathic identification with the individual and search for more information.