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levinthereturn t1_ir2061c wrote

I never understood what is the point of these "facial reconstruction". I mean they're Homo Sapiens like us, it's not like they had different looks. Do they have a scientific value?

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Euphoric-Carry1725 t1_ir2351x wrote

They had different diets and quality of life. They also mostly lived in a monoculture.

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Tria821 t1_ir28fla wrote

Forensic reconstruction help in modern day murder cases. We can practice on old skulls, 'humanizing' bones, to draw the interests of modern man. On the pathology side, we learn a lot from studying the remains of even the recently dead all the way through early humans to see how diseases mutated, how/if they were treated back then, and to learn how a disease might progress without having to leave current patients to suffer for research.

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silverob t1_ir2bsnn wrote

Has anyone done one on a skull that we have photos of the person, so we can see if it is an accurate representation. Or just artistic interpretation.

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vengefulbeavergod t1_ir2fq79 wrote

Not exactly the same, but the John List case was a pretty compelling use of reconstruction

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satinsateensaltine t1_ir3b9m3 wrote

That was just some really freaky predictive art. Absolutely flooring how the artist rightly assumed his aging process.

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vengefulbeavergod t1_ir461jh wrote

The eyeglasses were what did me in! I remember an interview with the artist and he had very specific reasoning behind why he chose those frames

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Ed_Ironsides t1_ir23fac wrote

Scientific value? What do we get out of researching anything from the past? The main drive for archaeology is just curiosity.

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levinthereturn t1_ir25zd9 wrote

You're right, let me rephrase: do we learn something from this reconstructions, are they useful for historical research?

I'm not arguing against this thing, I'm genuinely curious.

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Derrick_Mur t1_ir24au0 wrote

Generically, humans do tend to have the same appearance features, but there’s variety at the level of specifics, especially when considering geographic location. For example, Subsaharan Africans, East Asians, and Western Europeans share a lot of facial features, but there is also notable differences as well. The same holds for people in the past. In that regard, these things give us a better grasp of specific features that were commonly exhibited in a given place and in a given time frame

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BlueString94 t1_ir2f7kl wrote

First of all, your premise is wrong. Human history is a long sequence of populations interbreeding with each other, forming new populations, and on and on. For example, people in modern India are a mix of three major population groups who met about four thousand years ago - before then, there likely wouldn’t have been that many people who look like they do now. Incidentally, this fact makes notions of racial purity even more ridiculous than they already are. (If you’re interested in this kind of thing, I recommend David Reich’s book - his lab at Harvard has been at the forefront of this research).

And secondly, even outside of genetics, there is a lot of literature about how the different diets of pre-modern humans led to them having different facial structures (the introduction of sugar and soft foods have led to degeneration in our jaw and facial shape today). These reconstructions can bring those epigenetic changes to life as well.

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socratessue t1_ir3x8zs wrote

Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich. Fascinating book! A bit slow going for a layman, but I loved it.

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Roboport t1_ir2yyil wrote

Humanizing history is a great way to get people interested in history. Mostly taught through events and "great people" it can be easy to forget the normal people.

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