yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Exclusive: Building the Face of a Newly Found Ancestor | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

We've all seen crime investigation shows where they find a skull in the woods, and they take it to a forensic artist who builds the soft tissue of the face back on, and it becomes a recognizable entity. The crime is sometimes solved, but how do you do that for an extinct species?

This is a reconstruction of Homo naledi. It's based on fossils that were found in the fall of 2013, deep inside of a cave in South Africa. It's a very interesting species; it's not very much like anything we've found before, so I doubt if there's going to be much argument that this represents a new species.

Basically, what I do is study the evidence that exists in the fossil record, and I use that evidence to predict what a face might look like. The key to all that is comparative anatomy. So, I have to do a lot of facial dissection of great apes, African apes, orangutans, and humans.

From the very beginning, this was such a fascinating ancestor to work on because it's such a weird combination of primitive and more humanlike traits. You start with a skull, and certain measurements on that skull tell you some things about the soft tissue of the face.

The ears are a boondoggle, really, for people like me who reconstruct heads because there's not much information a skull can tell you about the form of the ears. It's not true with noses. Homo naledi had a spine right at the base of the nasal opening that projects out of the nasal cavity, and that tells you that there is at least somewhat of a projecting nose. That's a human characteristic.

Skin color is a problem I obviously have to deal with when I'm thinking about the skin color that should be appropriate for a specific prehistoric hominid. I look to the populations that are living there today. In this case, I'm dealing with a form that lived in South Africa, so the San people were a good model for me to base the idea of skin color on.

The actual pattern of the hair — we simply don't have that kind of information in the fossil record, so I'm making a guess there. I'm using commonalities in the hair pattern in faces that you see in great apes and humans.

It's a wonderful thing to be in the position of being the guy who figures out what some ancient species that's never been found before looked like. So, the final form of a reconstruction of a face is often a surprise to me.

It's the cumulative result of all these individual anatomical decisions, but it has this big "Eureka" moment at the end of the reconstruction, which is almost like the end of a mystery story where an identity is revealed. That's an exciting moment for me — to have that often surprising moment of seeing the face as an entirety for the first time.

More Articles

View All
Birth of the Slacker | Generation X
Most Gen Xers are in school during the crash, so at first they think, “Like, so what?” I’d never quite understood the stock exchange game enough to be interested. I would like to meet this Dow Jones; I thought he was a guy in all the Disney movies. I viv…
The Sea Otter's Enchanted Forest | America's National Parks
Just offshore, the shallow coastal waters are also a refuge for marine mammals, such as the sea lions that hang out on the rocks or hunt beneath the sea. Here, in their own enchanted forest, the kelp beds are several stories deep. [Music] There are seals…
Free response example: Significance test for a mean | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
Regulations require that product labels on containers of food that are available for sale to the public accurately state the amount of food in those containers. Specifically, if milk containers are labeled to have 128 fluid ounces and the mean number of f…
Capturing Death - What One Photographer Learned on Assignment | Exposure
How do you want to die? Is really the question. You know, what is the quality of your death? What is the quality of a good death? It is the thing that we’re most afraid of. You’re going to die. You will be no more. Who, whoever it is that you believe you …
Explorer Albert Lin explores a cave burial site filled with ancient carvings
So little is known about the Picts. Searching for their lost kingdom means I must follow every lead, and there’s something on the walls of this cave that’s drawing me in. I’m going to start the scan. Okay, yeah, my handheld Light Art technology allows me…
"He Saved My Life" American Soldier Returns to Help Iraqi Captain Fleeing ISIS | National Geographic
[Music] [Music] Ian yes for [Music] I’m very scared to lose my son, lose my daughter, lose my wife, thus all my [Music] life. The soldiers, like the captain, are the ones that kept us alive. My name is Chase Msab. I’m a veteran of the Iraq War. I did thre…