I love the subtle sloth thumbs-up it’s giving as well. ‘10/10 tree, would lick again’.
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Did not even notice that! 
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Certainly admire the artistic skill necessary to start with a skull, add clay putty, and a face results. Have they ever done a study where there’s a known photo of the person in life which they kept from the skull/face artist and then compared how ‘accurate’ it was as ‘sculpted’? …seems to a skeptical twit like me that there’s a whole lot of facial features determined by soft tissues long decayed away. Perhaps at least don’t tell them beforehand that it’s a Neanderthal skull
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Ah. Dig deep into the BB vault you’ll find a comment of mine where I warned about projecting positive traits onto Neanderthals as it could become another rallying point for Europe’s far right. I don’t recall the blogger who posted it, (Cory?) but basically someone was excited to exclaim that ‘thing we thought was bad turns out to have been good’. The usual authenticity stuff we do here at BB all the time. Well, turns out the racists caught onto the idea eventually.
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Doing the opposite, creating realistic skeletons based on the shape of the soft tissues, is perhaps even more impressive.
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The thickness of the flesh at various key points is supposed to be based on statistical data, but given how much forensic science has turned out to be questionable, I too am skeptical of these kinds of results.
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The skull was squashed flat to about 2cm deep.
I heard Dr Pomeroy talking on the radio about the discovery and rebuild – such enthusiasm.
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He’s usually inside the museum …
… and the first time I initially completely overlooked him. A bit later I wondered why the guy in the good suit just stood there, and even later I noticed the hand-axe. And wondered whether he got it from the gift shop. And then, finally, the penny dropped.
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He kinda looks like Ian McKellen.
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I’d be more skeptical of duplicating the neanderthal musculature, but I think the people that can sculpt homo sapien faces on skulls have a tremendous body of knowledge to draw on (we’re everywhere, and we take pretty good notes about ourselves.) anyone working something that niche has got to be an uber nerd who really knows that stuff. but how neanderthal muscle and tissue translates to neanderthal skulls? not sure, but my money is on the handful of people that work in this field can probably navigate the skull pretty well. pretty neat work, even accounting for the margin of error.
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One thing I have always wanted to see a demonstration of to gauge how accurate these kind of reconstructions are would be for forensic sculptors to recreate the face of a person who is still alive, or just a person we have plenty of photos of, based on a scan/model/reconstruction of their skull. The idea being that the sculptor doesn’t get to see what the person actually looks like until they’ve finished their best guess so we can make a comparison to see how close they got.
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Get a haircut, hippie!
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… surely they just mean “people like us, not lower animals or plants or space aliens”
Obviously the word “human” comes from the Homo part, not from the sapiens part
and if we’re all 5% Neanderthal the whole idea that we were “different species” was wrong anyway
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Yeah, still working on the “sapient” bit by the looks of it.
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Do you consider lions and tigers the same species?
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Wolves and dogs can interbreed and have fertile descendants, but are considered different species, but there are clearly differences, the ability to digest cereals and normally differences in facial muscles and essentially the behavior with humans that make them considered different species.
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“Species” is a human concept anyway, a mental box / shorthand / classification scheme we use to make sense of the complex reality. There will always be exceptions and different definitions, of varying complexity and precision, for different purposes.
Also - I’m always delighted by these reconstructions based on skulls, whether they are Neanderthals or something even older, or just (pre)historic modern humans. It’s a really impressive feat, and the results, well, humanize our past wonderfully.
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