Scientists have revealed the face of what may be the “oldest human” to walk the Earth: a woman who lived 45,000 years ago.
His dark features were brought to life by an international team of academics from Brazil, Australia and Italy using a digital model of his broken skull.
The recovered fossilized remains in the Czech Republic more than 70 years ago they are only a part of the skull, as researchers believe that it was eaten by an animal after death.
While the team did not have access to the ancient skull, they used already recorded measurements and reference images, which the researchers used earlier to recreate Tutankhamen’s face this year.
The woman, nicknamed Zlatý kůň, or golden horse, it was among the first Homo sapiens to live in Eurasia after our species migrated out of Africa, and its genome was about three percent Neanderthal ancestry.
Zlatý kůň is considered a modern human, as this group had very large brains compared to early humans who arose from ape-like ancestors.
The woman, nicknamed Zlatý kůň, or golden horse, was among the first Homo sapiens to live in Eurasia after our species migrated out of Africa.
The process of using recorded images and measurements is known as facial approximation, which is used in forensic studies.
It is the prediction of a face from a skull without prior knowledge of the actual facial appearance of the deceased before death.
SStudy co-author Cícero Moraes, a Brazilian graphics expert, said living science that he and the team used statistical data recorded in 2018 by researchers who created a reconstruction of the skull for educational purposes.
This was used with two CT scans of a modern man and woman, resulting in the digital face.
What caught our attention the most was the robustness of the structure. [of the face]especially the jaw [lower jaw]’ Moraes said.
‘When [archaeologists] found the skull, the first experts who analyzed it thought it was a man, and it is easy to understand why, in addition to the fact that the skull has characteristics very compatible with the male sex of current populations’, including a ‘robust’ jaw.
“We see that the jaw structure of Zlatý kůň tends to be more compatible with Neanderthals.”
Fossilized remains recovered in the Czech Republic more than 70 years ago are only part of the skull, as researchers believe it was eaten by an animal after death.
His dark features were brought to life by an international team of academics from Brazil, Australia and Italy using a digital model of his broken skull.
The grayscale images allowed them to generate more objective and scientific shots of the old woman’s face, allowing them to then add color, hair, and fur.
The skull was found in nine pieces in 1950 in a Bulgarian cave called Bacho Kiro.
Moraes told Live Science that archaeologists believe the animals bit into the woman’s face after death.
‘This animal could have been a wolf or a hyena ([both were] present in the fauna of that time), he said.
‘Despite covering a considerable part of the surface of a compound skull (skull + mandible), the structure is missing some regions, most notably part of the nasal bone, part of the maxilla, the left orbit and the left part of the frontal bone ,’ read the study published on July 18.
‘In 2018, a multinational team of researchers proceeded to the work of three-dimensional reconstruction of the missing regions, using statistical data extracted from a group composed of 31 skulls, 15 of current men and 15 of current women, scanned by computed tomography at the Center Hospitalier Universitaire (CHU) from Bordeaux, France, and from the Moča skull, found in Slovakia, dated 13,100 BP.’
The recent work used the 2018 skull recreation, available in an open publication, and recreated a digital skull that closely resembled Zlatý kůň.
The team also used another 30 skulls of different ancestry and sex to fill in the gaps for the woman.
“The final images were generated using Blender 3D’s Cycles renderer and consisted of bust views composited to show the more objective elements of the face, with a focus on overall structure,” the researchers wrote in the article.
‘For images with objective elements, the eyes were closed, the image was converted to grayscale, the bust had no hair.’
Moraes told Live Science that the grayscale images allowed them to generate more objective and scientific shots of the old woman’s face, allowing them to later add color, hair and fur.
The result is a realistic image of a woman with curly dark hair and brown eyes.
“We were looking for elements that could make up the visual structure of the face only at a speculative level, since no data was provided on what the color of the skin, hair, and eyes would be,” Moraes said.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany announced in 2021 that Zlatý kůň lived for only 2,000 years after the first interspecies dating between humans and Neanderthals.
The DNA of this person and their population is not seen in modern-day people in Asia or Europe, where Homo sapiens later colonized, the researchers found.
This evidence, the academics said, means that the individual from the Czech Republic is almost certainly older than other contenders with the claim to be the oldest human fossil in Europe.
