New Delhi:
A UK bio-archaeologist has reconstructed the face of a woman who lived in Dorset about 2,000 years ago. The face was recreated using evidence from her remains, hinting at how the woman looked when she was alive, reported BBC.
The skull and bones of the young woman buried overlooking Kimmeridge Bay were discovered in the year 2000 after a cliff erosion. The remarkable project to recreate her face was led by Bournemouth bio-archaeologist Amber Manning, who used cutting-edge 3D technology and forensic techniques to give the ancient woman a face for the first time in millennia.
“Making a reconstruction, I usually think that we are looking into their world,” said Ms Manning.
She added, “I took her age, sex, weight and ethnicity into account, as these factors help determine tissue thickness. So, in this case, a woman, about 20 to 30 years of age, with signs of undernourishment in a period of her life.”
The results will soon be on display at Wareham Town Museum. It is currently closed for winter and reopens on April 5.
Last year in May, a team of archaeologists unveiled the reconstructed face of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman. The face was reconstructed using a smashed skull found in 2018.
As per a report by news agency AFP, the woman was named Shanidar Z, after the cave in Iraq’s Kurdistan where the skull was discovered. This discovery also led to the investigation of over 40 Neanderthal women, who were laid to rest in a sleeping position beneath a huge vertical stone marker.
The last Neanderthals mysteriously died around 40,000 years ago, just a few thousand years after humans arrived.
The AFP report added that Shanidar Z’s skull was flattened to a thickness of two centimetres (0.7 inches), possibly by a rock fall, which may have happened soon after she died. It is still considered the best preserved Neanderthal find of this century.