Reconstructed a woman’s face from more than 30,000 years ago

In 1881 a team of archaeologists found a human skull in a cave nearby Mladea village of today Czech Republic. The remains were attributed to a Man lived during the Upper Paleolithic, about 29,000 years ago. A deeper analysis and a comparison with other skulls found at the same site made it possible to determine that the remains belonged to a girl aged 17 lived inAurignaciana period of Upper Paleolithic it goes from 43,000 to 26,000 years ago.

A group of scientists made one digital copy of what probably the sight of the girl, based on the information gathered from the first excavations at the end of the nineteenth century and from the reconstructions carried out in the 1930s, but which, however,, they were inaccurate because of the limited technology of the time. The study is published in an online book titled “The Forensic Facial Approach to the Skull Mladeč 1“.

Lack of jaw did not allow to reconstruct the whole face, but the missing data were integrated by the researchers based on the data obtained from the CT-scan of 200 modern humans and individuals belonging to European, Asian and African populations.

In our case we have presented two reconstructions: a simpler and more scientific one, in black and white, in which the girl has her eyes closed and has no hair; the other more subjective, in color and with hair and hair.

Cicero Moraes, coordinator of the study