Heritage

A striking new depiction envisions an ancient Homo sapiens featuring a heavy brow, dark hair, and a beard, but it is not a picture of a single prehistoric human. In a new Heritage study, researchers have created the simulated Jebel Irhoud face from the digitally reconstructed Moroccan skull, believed to be around 315,000 years old. The Daily Mail report focused on the photo-realistic impression, while scientists published a plain black-and-white version to indicate skeletal structure. Between the two lies a useful lesson about how we picture our earliest relatives. One Skull, Several People The starting point of the reconstruction goes back to Irhoud 1, which was extracted from a mine in the early 1960s. The braincase and upper facial bones