“Gaze Upon the Face of an Ancient Egyptian Who Lived Thousands of Years Before the Pyramids. Human remains, dating back 30,000 years and discovered in the Nile Valley, have been reconstructed to reveal facial features, providing a unique glimpse into the personal lives of the people of ancient Egypt.”
Brazilian archeologist Moacir Elias Santos and 3D artist Ccero Moraes collaborated to create the facial reconstructions. The two used a nearly complete skeleton that was discovered in 1980 at the ancient Egyptian site of Nazlet Khater 2 as the basis for their investigation.
The skeleton belonged to a young man of African descent who was about 165 cm (5 feet 4 inches) tall, possibly in his late teens or early twenties.
Because to the skeleton’s extremely fractured bones and the relatively primitive state of radiocarbon dating technology at the time, early attempts to date the skeleton were unsuccessful. Thankfully, a stone axe was discovered next to the remains, which was between 35,000 and 30,000 years old.
According to the study, the skull can be regarded as “modern,” indicating that this person may have been able to think similarly to people today. They do point out, however, that the remains do have some “archaic” traits, most notably a broader jaw than contemporary Homo sapiens.
The missing pieces of the remains were subsequently put back together utilizing a variety of scientific methods after the photogrammetry imaging technology had successfully captured the contour of the head. They had to figure out where and how the soft tissue would rest on their skull after assembling an approximate complete skull.
As facial reconstruction from a skull alone is not a precise science, some artistic license is required. This is due to the fact that the skull’s structure can only offer a limited amount of information on how soft tissue like muscle and fat would actually appear on a person’s face.
Two final photos were produced as a result, “one more subjective and artistic and the other more objective and scientific,” according to the team. The “artistic” example has hair, a light beard, and expressive eyes whereas the “scientific” image is more of a raw bust.
The researchers write in their paper, “Although it contains speculative elements about the individual’s appearance, as it is a work that will be presented to the general public, it provides the necessary elements for a complete humanization, which is very challenging to achieve only with exposure of the skull and deficient in the objective image in grayscale with eyes closed.
This individual would have had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and been only equipped with brainpower and stone implements. Permanent towns didn’t begin to form throughout Egypt until 6000 BCE, or about 25,000 years after this man lived.
Of all, this was the place where one of the most magnificent ancient civilizations, recognized for its extremely complex culture and architectural achievements, was born. Although the origins of Ancient Egypt’s technological prowess are frequently presented as a deep mystery, scholars have recently begun to develop a better understanding (no, it wasn’t from aliens).
