The face of the oldest known human has been reconstructed for the first time.
The reconstruction revealed the face of a man described as “strong and serene”.
The fossils, which originated from the remnants of the Jebel Irhoud, named after the Moroccan location where they were discovered, demonstrated that Homo sapiens, or humans, evolved 100,000 years earlier than previously believed.
They also demonstrated that, contrary to what earlier research showed, our ancestors expanded beyond the “cradle of mankind” in East Africa and dispersed millennia before.
Mr. Moraes described the procedure as follows: “First, I used data from the Max Planck Institute researchers to scan the skull in three dimensions.
“Then I proceeded with the facial approximation, which consisted of crossing several approaches, such as anatomical deformation.”
With this method, a 3D skull diagram was projected onto a prototype of a “donor” skull, based on an adult guy with a low body mass index.
Mr. Moraes claimed that the skull’s “robust and masculine” traits were the reason he decided to give it a male face.
Predicting the soft tissue thickness and the expected projection of the nose and other facial components was done using additional data from modern people.
“The final face is the interpolation of all this data, which generates two groups of images, one objective, with more technical elements, without hair and in greyscale,” explained Mr. Moraes.
Without hair and skin pigmentation
With hair and skin pigmentation
The skull itself was described by the designer as “excellent and quite coherent, anatomically speaking” after being assembled from a composite of several specimens.
The Jebel Irhoud skeleton was described as having a “modern-looking face and teeth, and a large but more archaic-looking braincase” by the Max Planck Institute, which provided the data from the skull.
According to the Institute, the braincase evolved into the skulls we all have today due to genetic alterations impacting brain connectivity, organisation, and development.
In agreement, Moraes likened the Skhul V skull to an early form of modern humans.
Some features of the Jebel Irhoud skull are consistent with those of Neanderthals or Heidelbergensis, extinct humans’ relatives.
“It is very interesting to observe the differences and compatibilities between the structures of these skulls and faces over thousands of years.”
When scientists first found fossils from the Jebel Irhoud in the 1960s, they thought the bones were around 40,000 years old. However, after returning to the site, they discovered that the bones were actually over 300,000 years old.
“We used to think there was a cradle of mankind 200,000 years ago in east Africa,” stated Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute at the time.Actually, we discovered that Homo sapiens originated in Africa and dispersed throughout the continent as early as 300,000 years ago.”
The 195,000-year-old Homo sapiens remains formerly thought to be the oldest were surpassed by the new find in Omo Kibish, Ethiopia.
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