How I reconstruct the faces of early human ancestors
Sculptor Élisabeth Daynès works in paleo-reconstruction, bringing the faces of long-dead human ancestors back to life.
By Rachel Feltman June 19, 2018
Julia Rothman
Thirty years ago, I was sculpting hyperrealistic masks for theatrical productions. Then I met these scientists who asked me to create models of Paleolithic hunters for museum exhibits. When I visited their lab, I saw 20 ancient skulls on a shelf, and I was fascinated by all the different shapes early humans took. I wanted to get my hands on those skulls.
Since then, it’s been my job to bring Âancient people back to life, a field called paleo-Âreconstruction. We convey science’s best guess about how these human relatives looked. I start with a plaster cast of the skull and lay clay “muscles†over it, building thin layers to mimic flesh. The tricky parts are the features. Right now I’m working on a Homo naledi—a 300,000-year-old relative of ours that archaeologists discovered in 2013. Many hominids looked more like chimpanzees than today’s humans, so I could make the nose chimpÂlike or modern. But I’m waiting for the scientists to determine that, based on how much H. naledi’s teeth or other remains resemble those of better-understood species.
https://www.popsci.com/paleo-reconstruction
