


An international team of researchers has approximated the face of a woman whose 45,000-year-old remains were discovered more than 70 years ago.
The severed skull of the Zlatý kůň woman — the oldest modern human to be genetically sequenced — was found buried in a cave system in the Czech Republic in 1950.
Scientists created the digital face using data from the 2018 CT scans of her reconstructed skull, according to an online paper published last month.
One image shows a woman with dark, curled hair, light brown skin, and brown eyes set on a strong face with proportionally wide features.
Interesting Engineering noted that the woman’s nine-piece skull is under the care of the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum in Prague, and the researchers didn’t have access to the bones for their facial experiment.
The study authors reported the skull is missing part of the nasal bone, part of the maxilla, the left orbit, and the left part of the frontal bone.
“An interesting piece of information about the skull is that it was gnawed by an animal after her death,” co-author Cícero Moraes, a Brazilian designer, told Live Science. “This animal could have been a wolf or a hyena ([both were] present in the fauna at that time).”
Nodding to her Neanderthal ancestry, Moraes noted the woman’s “robust” jaw and large brain cavity.
“We looked for elements that could compose the visual structure of the face only at a speculative level since no data was provided on what would be the color of the skin, hair and eyes,” Moraes said.
He added: “Once we had the basic face, we generated more objective and scientific images, without coloring (in grayscale), with eyes closed and without hair. Later, we created a speculative version with pigmented skin, open eyes, fur and hair.”
Moraes and his team used a similar technique to create a 3D approximation of King Tut’s face.
Those findings were reported in May.