Scientists have digitally reconstructed a woman's face based on skeletal remains that were found in 2002 at Tam Lod Rock in northwestern Thailand. The remains included skull bones and teeth.
The body appears to have been laid on the left side in a bent position. A hammer (a stone that was used as a hammer) was placed across the forearm.
The burial was surrounded by five pebbles and rounded limestone fragments. All of this can be interpreted as part of the woman's burial ritual, but this is just speculation, as the graves, according to scientists, vary across the region.
Examining bones
A Thai research team led by Rasmi Shookondj, a professor of archeology at Silpakorn University in Bangkok, found that the bones belonged to a woman who was 25-35 years old. Her height was 152 centimeters.
The team used accelerator mass spectrometry to separate radiocarbon isotopes from the sediment that the earth contained in the burial (isotopes are atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons). Using known indicators of the rate of decay of this type of carbon, scientists have established that the woman lived 13,640 years ago, during the late Pleistocene.
This indicates that the grave is the oldest human burial site excavated in the northwestern highlands of Thailand, and the woman in it is likely the direct ancestor of the Southeast Asian population,”writes Shoocongdej in the academic journal Antiquity …
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What did the woman's face look like?
The Thailand-funded research project did not rely on a widely used forensic facial reconstruction method to represent a woman's face. Instead, to assess the characteristics of the human face, scientists took as a basis a series of strong connections between the skull and soft tissues.
"Facial reconstruction is a very popular technique, but it has been proven and scientifically unreliable since 2002," said study co-author Susan Hayes of the University of Wollongong in Australia.
Hayes noted that the woman is an ideal candidate to test whether new techniques can restore some of the unique features of a human face that is not European. The scientist used measurements of skulls, muscles, skin and soft skin of the face obtained from large samples of modern populations around the world. She then applied the data to determine the relationship between skull and soft tissue parameters with facial features. Applying this relationship to Thai skeletal remains, Hayes created a 2D image. It turns out that the woman had small, almond-shaped eyes and a wide jaw.
“The woman is anatomically modern, so you'd expect her to have an anatomically modern face,” Hayes said. She explained that facial reconstruction in museums tends to depict ancient human ancestors in a generally accepted style.
“But this image is in no way supported by evidence in research by scientists. It refers to Christian mythology explaining the appearance of wild people, which predates Darwinian teaching,”she added.
However, the main problem with the study was to make sure the results weren't overly biased towards the looks of modern women. Indeed, most of the skull-soft tissue connections have been derived from variants displayed in recent European populations.
Stone Age women looked exactly like this
“So it is possible that these predominantly European relationships may have rewritten the distinctive late Pleistocene and population characteristics of women,” Hayes said.
“Instead, compared to facial data from 720 modern women living in 25 different countries on three continents, the appearance of a Stone Age woman remained distinctly pronounced. Moreover, it did not affect the European characteristics,”the scientists say.
Facial fit showed a stronger relationship with women from East and Southeast Asia and, as evidenced by the discovery, is associated with modern Japanese women in terms of face width and height.
“Analysis of the shape of the eyes, nose and mouth also indicates that the Stone Age woman bore morphological similarities to African women. Especially the size of the nose and mouth was the same,”the researchers say.
“Apart from what modern Hungarian women have in common with regard to mouth width, the European type, despite dominating both in comparative population research and in the methods used to assess facial appearance, is absent in this case,” the researchers say. Overall, the assessment demonstrated the distinctive characteristics of the late Pleistocene skull, such as a larger jaw and stronger facial features.
"The disadvantage of the methods used by the team is that they take longer than the much faster and relatively simple face reconstruction method," the scientists state. But Hayes said: "The dead deserve the best we can do, no matter how long ago they lived, and that involves spending time applying the best methods of evaluating each unique face from our human past."
Maya Muzashvili