Forensic Scientist Recreates Face Of Earliest European
Submitted by coldrum on Wednesday, 24 June 2009 Page Views: 1146
Other ArchaeologyScientists have used a clay sculpture to recreate the face of the earliest known European.Using an incomplete skull and jawbone retrieved seven years ago by potholers in a cave near the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, Richard Neave, a forensic scientist in the UK, successfully reconstructed the head of the ancient European ancestor.
Scientists are unsure of whether the bone fragments belonged to a male or female, but radiocarbon analysis dates the find to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago.
During that time, Europe was occupied by both Neanderthal and modern Homo sapiens, or Cro-Magnons, researchers said.
The skull is presented by Alice Roberts, an anthropologist at Bristol University. It will be debuted on the BBC2 series The Incredible Human Journey.
“I'm a scientist and objective but I look at that face and think ‘Gosh, I'm looking at the face of somebody from 40,000 years ago’ and there's something weirdly moving about that,” Roberts told Radio Times.
“Richard creates skulls of much more recent humans and he's used to looking at differences between populations.”
“He said the skull doesn't look European or Asian or African. It looks like a mixture of all of them. That's probably what you'd expect of someone among the earliest populations to come to Europe.”
The skull features a larger cranium and larger molars than modern humans. Its skin tone is darker than modern white Europeans, which is likely to be more characteristic to other European human ancestors of its time period.
The ancient human likely made its life on hunting deer and eating fruit and herbs in ancient forests, scientists said.
"Taken together, the material is the first that securely documents what modern humans looked like when they spread into Europe," Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology at Washington University in Missouri, told the UK’s Telegraph.
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