See the Face of a Neolithic Man Who Lived in Jericho 9,500 Years Ago

Prehistoric people modified a skull to create a rudimentary likeness of its owner. Now, scholars have produced a more accurate facial reconstruction

Meilan Solly
Associate Editor, History

January 11, 2023



The researchers' facial reconstruction shows a bearded, brown-eyed man in his 30s or 40s. Cicero Moraes, Thiago Beaini and Moacir Santos

Around 7000 B.C.E., residents of Jericho, a settlement in what is now the West Bank, transformed seven skulls into sculptures, adorning the bones with plaster and paint and covering the eye sockets with shells. Perhaps designed to represent specific people, the craniums were likely reburied as images “of community forebears long after their individual identities were forgotten,” according to the British Museum, which houses one of the so-called Jericho skulls.

Archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon discovered the cache of prehistoric skulls while excavating Jericho’s ruins in 1953. All seven ended up in different collections, from the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum to the Jordan Archaeological Museum.

But the very modifications that made the specimens unique also posed a problem for archaeologists hoping to peer beneath the plaster with traditional X-rays. In 2016, experts at the British Museum created the first 3D model of a Jericho skull, drawing on non-invasive micro-CT scans that digitally removed the materials encasing the bones to approximate what their owner may have looked like in life.

Now, reports Tom Metcalfe for Live Science, a team led by 3D designer Cicero Moraes is using an alternative technique to produce its own stunning facial reconstruction of the skull. While the 2016 model relied on the Manchester method, which is often used to reconstruct the faces of crime victims, Moraes and his colleagues used a deformation and anatomical adaptation method more closely associated with plastic surgery and prosthetics manufacturing.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see-the-face-of-a-neolithic-man-who-lived-in-jericho-9500-years-ago-180981426/