Facial reconstruction of Griffin warrior

The face of Bronze Age fighter revealed: Scientists reconstruct face of the 'Griffin Warrior' who was part of an elite group 3,500 years ago

Facial reconstruction of Lord of Moken

I wonder when we will start seeing facial reconstructions that make use of ancient DNA. Ancient DNA isn't very good for reconstructing facial features, but it should be quite good at reconstructing pigmentation.

Facial reconstruction for 1,400-year-old 'Lord of Morken'

The man's remains were discovered in 1955 in a Franconian burial ground in Morken, near Cologne. He had been interred around the year 600 AD in a royal burial chamber there. The precious goods within the grave, especially the materials used for his weapons, suggest that the man enjoyed a special status in the population, Elke Nieveler a specialist for the early Middle Ages at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum said.

Bronze Age warrior from Poland

Google translation of original article:

Skull warrior was in such good condition that the museum was tempted by an experiment - a reconstruction of his face. Tasks undertaken by the research team of Dr. Dorothy Lorkiewicz-Muszyńska of the Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Medical Sciences. Every day with their ability to use the police, for example, when you need to identify a murder victim. The first step was to make a 3D scan of the skull.

- At the base using a special computer program was applied to the muscle tissue - explains the director Bartecki. - Method shows more than 90 percent. compliance with the real appearance of a man - says.

Proved invaluable assistance skeleton results Rogalin. Also genetic. Thanks to them, we know that the warrior had a dark complexion, dark hair and eyes.

This combination of traits is rather uncommon in modern Poles. It seems that eastern Europeans looked quite different four thousand years ago than they do today.

Reconstruction of 5,500-year old "Stonehenge Man"

I don't see any mention of DNA in the article The face of prehistoric Britain: Forensic scientist uses Neolithic man's 5,500-year-old skull to create lifelike image as part of new £27m Stonehenge centre, so it's not clear whether the pigmentation attributed to "Stonehenge Man" is the artist's imagination or based on solid evidence.

From the article:

He is the star attraction of Stonehenge's new £27million modern visitor centre that has taken decades to produce. 

A Neolithic man has been brought to life after the most advanced forensic reconstruction of a face, based on a 5,500-year-old skeleton buried in a long barrow 1.5 miles from Stonehenge. 

The new face of the model, which has been carefully reconstructed to show people what life was like

Facial reconstruction of 5,600-year old Maltese woman

Source: Revealed...the face of a Maltese woman 5,600 years ago

Heritage Malta also launched a 3D virtual reconstruction of facial features based on one of the prehistoric skulls (over 5,000 years old) found at the Xaghra Stone Circle in Gozo. It revealed, for the very first time, what one of the earliest Maltese actually looked like.
It was a face which was much closer to what one would expect from a woman of our day and age rather than that of a person who lived on the islands over 5,000 years ago.

Upcoming Richard III documentary

From Channel 4:

With the support of historians, the University of Leicester's archaeologists identified a possible location of the monastery as the car park for Leicester City Council's Social Services department. However as Richard Buckley, Head of the University of Leicester's Archaeology Services tells the programme: "...the chance of finding Richard was, I don't know, a million to one." Yet the dig commenced and on the very first day a male skeleton was discovered - which careful examination would later reveal to have curvature of the spine and battle injuries including a head wound.

For the last three months, the remains has been subjected to some of the most cutting edge technology and forensic testing in existence - with Channel 4 capturing every moment. In specialist labs in Leicester and across the country, the bones have been subjected to CT scans, they have been carbon-dated, DNA has been extracted to be compared to that of one his living descendants, the source of the spinal curvature has been investigated - and the entire body has been subjected to rigorous testing to reveal blow-by-blow how this individual died and how he was buried.

Perhaps most fascinating of all, using technology developed to identify human remains in crime investigations, scientists have been busily re-creating the face these bones belong to - this image will be revealed exclusively in the programme the night it airs. And of course, Richard III: The King in the Car Park will reveal the results of what could be one of the most astonishing archaeological discoveries in recent history - whether England's missing king has indeed been recovered.

This will air on Feb 4.

Reconstruction of 7,500 years old forager from Norway

Source (in Norwegian)

FOTO: ARKEOLOGISK MUSEUM/UNIVERSITETET I STAVANGER

The many faces of Moora

Here is a 2,600-year old bog woman from Lower Saxony, Germany as reconstructed by forensic scientists (Illustration courtesy Ursula Wittwer-Backofen, University of Freiburg).

And, here is a German language article on the same female which shows many different reconstructions.

By Caroline Wilkinson:

or, by Sabine Ohrlogge:

Reconstruction of 2,500 year old Carthaginian

Racial Reality points me to this reconstruction. From the related story:

An anthropological study of the skeleton showed that the man died between the age of 19 and 24, had a pretty robust physique and was 1.7 metres (five feet six inches) tall, according to a description by Jean Paul Morel, director of the French archaeological team at Carthage Byrsa.

...

"We can clearly see that this exceptional witness to Carthage in the Punic era is a Mediterranean man, he has all the characteristics," noted Sihem Roudesli, a paleo-anthropologist at the Tunisian National Heritage Institute.

Forensic reconstruction of Oberkassel female skull

There is also a NSFW-ish picture of the reconstruction in the paper. Not sure if this level of depigmentation is warranted for this time frame.

Related: a reconstruction of a Neolithic Italian from Quinzano culture by the same authors.

3D FACIAL RECONSTRUCTION OF AN
ANCIENT FEMALE SKULL FROM
OBERKASSEL BEI BONN (GERMANY)

Marco Silvestri, Giancarlo Tomezzoli

Abstract

Because our technique of facial reconstruction proved to be successful, we decided to apply it to a skull of an older female subject preserved at the Paläontologisches Museum in Munich (Germany). The skull was found in Oberkassel bei Bonn (Germany), its age is 10,500 years. It appears that the skull is well reconstructed, complete, not much deformed, without traces of severe illnesses. The subject was a woman aged probably 15-25 years. The causes of the death cannot be determined. Because, also in this case, the skull does not appear too dissimilar from the skulls of the present people, and because, as far as can be understood the subject was healthy, it is reasonable to assume that the thickness of the soft tissues on the different portions of the skull was not dissimilar from that of today’s young Central European women and/or young American women of Central European origins. For the pigmentation, according to current statistics, we assumed fair skin and light coloured eyebrows, hair, and eyes. The reconstructed female face looks not dissimilar from the faces of today’s central European female subjects. However, in the light of the well-reconstructed state of the skull and of our reasonable assumptions on pigmentation, we can say that the reconstructed 3D face model and its artistic representation are good approximations of the facial aspect of a girl who lived at the time of the Würm Ice Age.

Link (pdf)

The face of Johann Sebastian Bach

A reader alerts me to a new forensic reconstruction of J. S. Bach. You can read about it (in English) in Deutsche Welle:

He only posed for one portrait, by Leipzig painter Elias Gottlob Haussmann, which has been reproduced in countless books.

But can anyone be sure that's really what Bach looked like?

Working with a cast of the composer's skull on loan from the Bach Museum in Eisenach, Scottish anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson has created a 3-D representation of the face of a man who died in 1750 at the age of 65.

Reconstructed face of Paleolithic woman from Sicily

'First' Sicilian Woman Gets Face

PALERMO (ANSA) - The face of a late Stone Age woman who lived in Sicily has been reconstructed by a sculptor working with anthropologists at Palermo University.

The skeleton of the woman, who lived 14,000 years ago, was discovered in a cave near Messina in 1937, along with the incomplete skeletons of six other humans, presumably her family.

The face was reproduced using reconstruction techniques that calculate the appearance of features from the form of the cranium. The same techniques have been used recently to recreate the faces of Egyptian pharaohs and Italy's own Count Ugolino, a 13th-century Tuscan noble whose bones were found in 2001.

Artistic licence was used when deciding to give the ancient Sicilian the same black hair common in modern women from southern Italy.

Thea, as she has been nicknamed, spent most of her life hunting, or gathering fruit and plants. At 165 cm, she was tall for her time. Experts estimate that when she died she was about 30, much older than the normal life expectancy in the late Stone Age.

"This means that she must have had a healthy and regular lifestyle," said Valerio Agnesi, director of the 'Gemmellaro' museum where the face, along with a recreation of her cave environment, is now on display.