A Face of 9,500 Year Old Palestinian Man Brought Back to Life

VIVA – The face of Palestinian man who died 9,500 years ago has been brought to life by a team of scientists using 3D scans of his skull.

The skull found by British archaeologist Dame Kathleen Kenyon near the Palestinian city of Jericho in 1953 belonged to a man over 40 years old. The reconstruction was carried out by Brazilian graphologist Cicero Moraes, archaeologist Moacir Elias Santos from Uniandrade, and forensic dentist Thiago Beaini from the Federal University of Uberlandia.

According to the British Museum, which has the skull and scanned it, the man died with badly damaged teeth and possibly a painful abscess.

He also appears to have recovered from a broken nose, and the shape of his head had been permanently altered as a consequence of it having been tightly bound as an infant. Perhaps the most curious aspect of the Jericho skull, however, is how it was decorated with plaster and even given shells for eyes, sometime after his death.

Experts believe that the man, while once a known individual, would have over time become a worshipped ancestor before ultimately being forgotten and finally buried.

On the reconstructive process, Mr. Moraes said: “We segmented the skull that is inside the plaster sculpture, generating a digital structure of it.

“With the skull available in a virtual environment, we made a series of statistical projections to find out what some regions of the face could have looked like, such as the nose, lips, and ears. To complement the data, we used a technique called anatomical deformation — adjusting the tomography structure of a living individual, so it becomes the person in the skull we approximated.” He said.

“When we interpolate the anatomical deformation data with the statistical projections, we have a face that could be that person’s in life.” He added.

From the published research, the expected accuracy rate is quite high. It is not a face that is 100 percent similar to what exists in life. But structurally, it deals with the general aspects of his face, where the changes in his face are enormous.

Researchers even added reconstructed aspects to reflect his age and according to the climate characteristics of the region, including skin, hair, beard, and eyes.