Scientists produce incredible facial reconstruction of the ‘Old Man’, a Neanderthal discovered 115 years ago

August 3, 1908 three Catholic priests discovered a human skeleton of prehistoric age buried almost entirely in a cave La Chapelle-aux-Saints In France.

The bones were initially thought to come from a modern human who showed signs of deformity due to advanced age and arthritis. However, Marcellin Boule, director of the Institute of Human Paleontology in Paris, determined that “the old man” was a Neanderthal who lived to be 40 years old.

“The Old Man” was a stone tool maker who lost most of his teeth and died from a blow to the head. The human’s skull exhibited many of the distinctive features of a “classic” Neanderthal, including a large, continuous brow bone, a flat cranial base, a wide nasal opening, and large eye sockets. according to eFossils.com a site maintained by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Prior to this discovery, other Neanderthal skulls had been discovered, but the discovery at La Chapelle-aux-Saints was the first with a nearly complete skeleton and complete set of tools, dramatically confirming that Neanderthals was a valid type of hominid, and not a mixture of pathologically deformed modern humans, as others have suggested.

Now the forensic artists they made a incredible digital facial reconstruction of “The Old Man” 115 years after its discovery, giving an idea of ​​what his face may have looked like when he lived between 47,000 and 56,000 years ago.

The researchers unveiled their new facial approximation at a conference presented by the Italian Ministry of Culture in October, where used existing CT scans, this means they use a rotating x-ray machine to create cross-sectional or 3D images of any part of the body, depending on the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB).

They then imported measurements along the Frankfurt horizontal plane (a line from the bottom of the eye socket to the top of the ear opening) from a human skull taken from a database of donors. This provided researchers with the framework needed to generate facial shape, he explains. Live Science .

Finally, they used soft tissue thickness markers in living human donors to digitally constructed the skin and muscles of the “old man”, and added details such as skin color and hair, although the investigation did not specify whether these decisions were based on DNA analysis or an educated guess.

“We generated two images, one more objective with only the bust in sepia without hair and another more speculative [y] colorful with beard and hair”, he told Live Science in an email Cicero Moraes, co-author of the study and Brazilian graphics expert. “This image shows how Neanderthals looked like us, but at the same time they were different, with more obvious features like the absence of chins, for example. Despite this, it is impossible not to look at the image and try to imagine what life was like for this individual thousands of years ago.

Although this is not the first attempt at facial reconstruction of this Neanderthal, This is new because CT scans were used. Previous reconstructions were inaccurate and looked exaggeratedly ape-like, Live Science explains.

Like a 1909 drawing by Czech painter František Kupka, where he depicted “The Old Man” in an everyday situation of the time. This design was frequently reproduced, leading later depictions of Neanderthals to give them a wild, chimpanzee-like posture, according to Linda Hall Library, an independent scientific research library in Kansas City, Missouri.

After 115 years, for the first time a facial approximation close to what Neanderthals really looked like Thanks to scanners, which allowed for more precise digital measurements and provided new knowledge about ancient humans.

“If we carefully observe the approaches proposed over the years, which span almost a century, You can see how the facial features of this Neanderthal have been softened and “humanized”, abandoning a more brutal perception or interpretation of it, which characterized the idea that past anthropologists had about Neanderthals,” said Francesco Galassi, co-author of the study and associate professor of physical anthropology at the University of Lodz (Poland), in an email at Live Science.

And he added: “This change in perception can undoubtedly be attributed to the many advances in the study of Neanderthals, which have shown how they were much more similar in anatomy – and therefore probably in physiology – to us, the Anatomically modern Homo sapiens. “Our reconstruction offers a new perspective on this ancient man and reflects this evolving notion.”