A Brazilian designer has created a three-dimensional image of what the first human would have looked like 300,000 years ago.
Knewz.com has learned that Cícero Moraes garnered information from the Max Planck Institute and combined it with features of contemporary humans to produce a ‘strong and serene’ looking face.
Moraes based most of his design on a skull recovered from the Moroccan Jebel Irhoud dig in 2017, where artifacts challenged the initial belief that the first humans originated in East Africa 200,000 years ago.
He explained his method saying: “Initially, I scanned the skull in 3D, using data provided by the researchers of Max Planck Institute.”
“Then I proceeded with the facial approximation, which consisted of crossing different approaches, such as anatomical deformation,” Moraes said via Pen News.
“This is where the tomography [the imaging of cross-sections using X-rays or ultrasound] of a modern human [head] is used, adapting it so that the donor's skull becomes the Jebel Irhoud skull and the deformation ends up generating a compatible face.”
Moraes indicated that he chose to reconstruct the features around a male’s face due to the robust properties of the archaic skull—which is noted to comprise more than one piece.
The digital designer went on to describe the Jebel Irhoud artifact as “excellent and quite coherent, anatomically speaking.”
Moraes, who is also a professor, and producer of veterinary prosthetics, noted that while finishing the design, he was reminded of another skull from Israel named Skhul V. This particular specimen dated back 120,000 years.
“The Jebel Irhoud skull is very similar to that of Skhul V, another archaic Homo sapiens,” Moraes explained.
“However, it also has some characteristics that are compatible with Neanderthals [early humans believed to have lived in Eurasia until 40,000 years ago] or Heidelbergensis [an era between 781,000 to 126,000 ago].”
“I drew a series of approximations in didactic images and the result was very interesting.”
“The final aspect is the interpolation of all this data, which generates two groups of images, one objective, with more technical elements, without hair and in grayscale”
“The other is artistic, with skin and hair pigmentation.”
Moraes confirmed the significance of the digitally resurrected human, saying: “What caught the most attention in relation to Jebel Irhoud is that this discovery placed our species in a historical time 100,000 years earlier than previously imagined.”
“It is currently the oldest Homo sapiens, dating to approximately 315,000 years before present.”
“The second oldest, found at the site of Omo Kibish in Ethiopia, was dated to 195,000 years before present,” Moraes noted.
Max Planck Institute Palaeoanthropologist, Jean-Jacques Hublin, confirmed the age of the skull at the time of its discovery saying: “We used to think that there was a cradle of mankind 200,000 years ago in east Africa.”
“But our new data reveals that Homo sapiens spread across the entire African continent around 300,000 years ago.”