Recreations of palaeolithic mass at the museum usually reckon like the typical Geico commercial caveman . FamedOtzi the Iceman , for example , has the brass of someone who ’d be fun to disembowel a moose with , but whose conversation might be just a little gauche . A new facial reconstruction of a Stone Age woman who lived in Thailand roughly 13,600 years acquaint the pleasant and in all probability more accurate visage .
https://gizmodo.com/this-5-300-year-old-iceman-has-close-relatives-living-i-5889000
A squad of Thai , Australian and Indonesian researcher were seek to overcome an archaeological drawback while producing this face : reconstruction oft skew too modern , and too European looking . So when the squad analyse the skeleton of a adult female regain in the Tham Lod rock’n’roll shelter in northwestern Thailand , they need to produce a more accurate depiction of what the char might have looked like , and to determine how the European bias was altering her appearance .
Researchers from the team first discover the five - or - so - foot - tall Tham Lod adult female back in 2002 , and fancy she was 25 to 35 yr old based on her skeleton . They also find she was buried roughly 13,600 class ago using radiocarbon date stamp . “ This makes this Tham Lod rockshelter individual the sometime human entombment to be excavated in the north - western Highlands of Thailand , and probably a direct descendant of the beginner population of Southeast Asia , ” the scientist write inthe paperpublished this month in the journal Antiquity .
But when trying to recreate the woman ’s typeface , the team run into a problem that many others sort of ignore — the popular “ facial reconstruction ” method relies on modern data bias towards European population . Lead scientist Susan Hayestoldthe website Ancient Origins that the method has been scientifically invalid since 2002 , but stay popular .
For the Tham Lod fair sex , the researcher analyzed where soft tissue model on faces from across the world ( and how it would sit on the Tham Lod skull ) to make out how individual feature might appear on this ancient fair sex . While their dataset , too , skewed European , they discover that their diversion maintained distinct feature of speech when compare to an international sample of 720 people , according toLiveScience . It also had some normal stereotypical of Stone Age skulls , include larger jaw and bigger dentition .
The net outcome was a woman who calculate a whole lot like present-day populations in Southeast Asia , with a Pleistocene pang . The researcher do point out that this specific reconstructive memory should be taken with caution — a more representative or larger dataset might produce a different result .
Ultimately , the squad think their method could have the best some of the bias presented by facial approximation methods . As Hayes told Live Science , she thinks scientists should put their right efforts into determine what these ancient individuals really look like .
[ AntiquityviaLiveScience ]
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