eli5 Anthropological Renditions

Question

I always see articles of anthropologist finding bones from a long time ago (prehistoric) And through research they end up with super detailed description of the kind of lives they lived, what they ate, what they might had worked at, and even how they looked. What I am most curious is about the visual renditions. Even more recently with Egypt renditions.

In: 2

Answer 1

Ok so archeologists are rarely looking at JUST the bones. The stuff *around* the bones is usually very important and gives us a lot of additional information. This is true of both the immediate surroundings of the bones, and their general geographical location. Stuff that’s immediately around the bones might be things like weapons or tools or other artifacts that may have been buried with the individual, and these can tell us a lot about the person. If they’re buried with a lot of hunting tools it’s likely the person was a hunter in life. And let’s say we find arrow heads with this dead hunter, and a couple miles away we found the remains of a settlement that also contained very similar arrow heads, and carbon dating (or other forms of dating) lets us know that the dead hunter, and the settlement were from about the same period in time. It’s likely then that this dead hunter and the people in the settlement were the same group of people. And in this settlement we find a pit with a bunch of very old garbage in it and amongst the garbage we find the shoulder blade of a deer with an arrow head embedded in it. When you put it all together you know that this person was likely a hunter, that lived with this group of people, and hunted and ate animals including deer. That’s quite a lot! The bones themselves are just one small piece of a much bigger puzzle and when you put all the pieces together you get a much more complete picture!

Now since this relies on putting pieces together sometimes we do it wrong, and we don’t understand the pieces we have, or put them together incorrectly, but the more work we do, the more we find, the more advanced our scientific techniques get, the clearer and more likely to be actuate our pictures of these people that lived long ago become.