When he was growing up in Stockholm, his family would spend vacations at a cottage a few miles away from where the grave had been found. A bird claw necklace dangled from her neck and a tight bun kept the hair off her face as she traveled among the trees 4,000 years ago. When he was done, the woman was clothed in tanned animal skins made with Stone Age techniques by Nilsson’s colleague Helena Gjaerum. This reconstruction took Nilsson 350 hours to complete. See more of Oscar Nilsson's reconstructions. “The logical part of the brain tells you this is fake, but the emotional experience is that someone is actually there.” “That’s showing a collision in the brain,” he says. It often happens when the two pairs of eyes-living and reconstructed-are around two feet apart. In past reconstructions, he’s known his job was done well when a museum visitor leans toward the face to examine its details and then jumps back, uncomfortable with the closeness. Even though she’s small, you wouldn’t want to mess with her.” “It’s a safe feeling, but also almost a bit cocky. “She’s not threatened, she feels at home, and she looks at this boy,” Nilsson says. Perhaps, he thought, they were on the way to winter camp. They were likely hunter gatherers, traveling behind the animal migrations. He imagined the boy was her son, and she was watching him as he ran ahead of her. The boy’s skeleton had been too damaged to inform a recreation, but Nilsson wanted to include him. When he thought about the woman’s eyes, he considered the boy she’d been buried with. The finished face is re-cast in a skin-tone silicone and Nilsson begins to add the details. What he can do is weave together emotions to give the sense that the face is in motion, and therefore, alive. “I need to bring the face alive, so you actually get the impression there’s someone looking at you within those eyes,” he says.īut he refrains from getting too creative-portraying a strong feeling like anger, for instance, is strictly forbidden, he says. Unlike gender, skin tone, and teeth, an expression cannot be preserved in bone. He determined she’d likely been light skinned with dark hair.Īfter that process, which he says has been rigorously tested, Nilsson departs the realm of scientific probability and enters phase two: his imagination. She lived at a time when farmers had relatively recently entered Scandinavia and begun mixing with hunter-gatherer groups. Instead, Nilsson analysed historic migration patterns. Watch the face of a 9,000-year-old teenager be reconstructed.īut in the case of the woman from Lagmansören, no readable DNA could be retrieved. DNA pulled from well-preserved bones can reveal the colour of hair, skin, and eyes-three pieces of the reconstruction that were previously speculative. Since he started crafting these faces, 3D printing and DNA technology have advanced, allowing him to flesh out a new level of detail. She’d possessed an interesting blend of male and female features, he thought. Her eyes were set low in the face, and the mandible bone-the lower jaw-was quite masculine. Her nose was a bit asymmetric from her profile he could tell it was turned upwards. She had protruding teeth, which shaped her mouth in a distinctive way. When Nilsson went about building the Stone Age woman’s face, he considered what he already knew: She was just under five feet-short even for her time. Many features can be accurately predicted using the record left in bone. These pegs hold up a layer of plasticine clay skin. Then he places small pegs to indicate tissue depth, which varies based on the gender, age, weight, and ethnicity of the individual. He begins his work by layering more than a dozen muscles made of clay onto a 3D printed replica of the recovered skull. See how these facial reconstructions reveal 40,000 years of English ancestry. Building these faces gives him, and the millions who view his reconstructions in museums around the world, a portal to the past. Over the past 20 years, Nilsson has become a pioneer of reconstructive archaeology, bringing more than a hundred long-deceased human ancestors to life. The museum was building an exhibit tracing 9,500 years of human habitation in Sweden and wanted to show visitors the oldest face from the north-the woman from Lagmansören. The Stone Age pair were the oldest skeletons found in that region of Sweden, where harsh conditions don’t lend themselves to preservation.
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