The Famous "Jericho Skull" Now Has a Face
The original facial reconstruction
In 1953. Kathleen Kenyon, a British archaelogist, unearthed seven skulls near an ancient settlement of Jericho, Palestine. The skulls were decorated with plaster and had shells as eyes. Some even showed traces of paint. Initially, Kenyon thought that the skulls were in fact portraits of some of the earliest people that lived in Jericho.
The skulls have been dated to be about 9,500 years old and at that time Jericho was one of the largest settlements in the Middle East. Like other various cultures of the time they had a ritual of mourning the dead which helped bind the society together. Therefore, the archaelogists assume that each plastered skull would have been a known individual, but as time passed they likely became ancestor figures who may have been worshipped. It’s thought they were safely reburied as portraits of community forebears long after their individual identities were forgotten.
The most famous of the seven skulls is called "Jericho Skull" and is currently housed in the British Museum in London. In 2016, the British Museum released precise measurements of the Jericho Skull based on a micro-computed tomography, or micro-CT. It was basically a highly detailed X-ray scan. The measurements led to the creation of a virtual 3D model of the skull ( pictured below) and the model was used to make an initial facial approximation.
However, a new rendition of the approximation has been published on December 22nd in the journal OrtogOnline. This facial reconstruction uses different techniques to determine how the face may have looked, and goes further by artistically adding head and facial hair. The reconstruction was done by a brazilian graphics expert Cicero Moraes, the leader of the project. Moraes' team relied heavily on anatomical deformation and statistical projections derived from computed tomography scans. Essentially, thousands of X-ray scans knitted together to create a 3D image of living people. This is the result:
Curiosities regarding the skull
"I wouldn't say ours is an update, it's just a different approach," Moraes said. But "there is greater structural, anatomical and statistical coherence." It is worth noting that the Jericho Skull features a couple of oddities. For instance, the cranium, or the upper skull is significantly larger than average and the skull has been artificially elongated when the man was very young, it was probably done by tightly binding it.
Moraes hopes to carry out digital approximations of other plastered skulls from the region, but so far only the precise measurements of the Jericho Skull in the British Museum have been published. "There is a lot of mystery around this material," Moraes said. "Thanks to new technologies we are discovering new things about the pieces, but there is still a lot to be studied."