There was recently news of a grup of scientists who reconstructed the face of a teenager who lived 1300 years ago in Britain.
How is this possible?
I can understand that they could infer skin color or even eye color from the region the remains are found but how can they possibly know from bones if the person has a hooked nose or bulging eyes or a wide mouth etc? You know, the features that usually are the features which make us different from one another. How??
Is this part make believe?
In: 11
Population surveys and extrapolation.
Photography and medical procedures like x-rays and mri’s allow us to match a person’s appearance with their skull shape. You can also do it post-mortem, again thanks to pictures.
Take all that info across a large number of people, combine and analyze it, and you get certain feature results. It really helps that we have actual bodies to study and figure out what soft tissue is supposed to be where.
There are also historical writings that can help fill in certain blanks. Was the population mainly dark haired, dark eyes, <insert-skin-tone>? You may get some of the exact details wrong like hair color and skin blemishes, but its not like there is a picture available to prove you are wrong.
The same way that forensic reconstruction is made from a skull of an unknown victim. There are general “rules” for flesh thickness over bone and other relationships between facial appearance and bone structure, and they use those “rules” to come up with an approximate appearance. The are only fairly good, usually. The appearances of the mock-up, the artistic rendition, to the actual person is often close but fairly rarely exact. Things like nose shape and eye shape are generally related to the underlying skull, although the rules do differ a bit based on ethnicity. The rules for a skull from southeast Asia will be a bit different from those for a western European skull.
The big point is that the reconstruction is not very precise. It is fairly general, and will be somewhat close as long as the rules used for the reconstruction are “true”. It might be totally wrong, but how would you know?
Who knew ancient people had medical records?
Thanks for explaining, now I can finally reconstruct my great-great-great-grandpa’s face. #FamilyReunionGoals
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