See the striking facial reconstruction of a Paleolithic woman who lived 31,000 years ago
In 1881, archaeologists unearthed the skull of a human buried inside a cave in Mladeč, a village in what is now the Czech Republic. At the time, researchers dated the skull to about 31,000 years ago and classified the individual as male.
But they were wrong about the Stone Age person's sex, a new study finds.
Now, more than 140 years later, researchers have corrected that error, revealing that the so-called Mladeč 1 skull belonged to a 17-year-old female who lived during the Aurignacian, part of the Upper Paleolithic period (roughly 43,000 to 26,000 years ago). The team published its findings as part of a new online book called "The Forensic Facial Approach to the Skull Mladeč 1 ..." that details how the scientists reclassified the sex of "one of the oldest Homo sapiens found in Europe."
"When the skull was analyzed individually, the features pointed to a male," Cicero Moraes, a Brazilian graphics expert and one of the book's co-authors, told Live Science ... "But when later studies compared the skull with others found at the site, the evidence pointed to a female." ...
Using information collected from the 19th-century archaeological dig, as well as forensic facial reconstructions performed by researchers in the 1930s that were limited due to a lack of technology, Moraes and co-authors Jiří Šindelář, a surveyor with local surveying company GEO-CZ, and Karel Drbal, deputy director of the Cave Administration of the Czech Republic, used CT (computer tomography) scans to create a digitized approximation of the skull. Because the mandible (lower jaw) was missing, Moraes looked to existing data of modern-day human jaws to help fill in the blanks of what this individual might have looked like. ...
