Scientists have reconstructed the face of the oldest known Homo sapiens, using a nearly 315,000-year-old skull unearthed in Morocco. The work, published this month in the journal Heritage, offers one of the most detailed looks yet at what an early member of the human species may have looked like.
The skull comes from Jebel Irhoud, a site where a mine worker stumbled upon ancient bones in the early 1960s. For decades, scientists classified the remains as an African Neanderthal variant dated to about 40,000 years old.
That changed in 2017, when new dating methods and studies published in the journal Nature showed the bones were roughly 315,000 years old, making them the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils on record.
How researchers reconstructed the face of an early Homo sapiens
Because no single skull from the site survived intact, researchers built a composite model using several fossils recovered from the same layer of earth. Most of the skull, including the braincase and upper face, comes from a specimen known as Irhoud 1, the original 1961 discovery.
The lower jaw was added from a second fossil called Irhoud 11, and portions of the upper teeth came from a third, Irhoud 10. All belonged to individuals found in the same archaeological layer.
A team led by Brazilian researcher Cicero Moraes used that composite skull to build the new facial approximation. The scientists relied on free, open-source software, including a program called Blender, paired with a technique known as anatomical deformation.
That method starts with a CT scan of a modern person and gradually reshapes it to match the ancient skull, rather than sculpting a face from nothing.
Two facial renderings, brain size, and model validation
The team produced two versions of the finished face. One is a plain gray image showing only bone-based features, meant for scientific comparison. The other is a colored, artistic version with skin tone, hair, and a beard, built to make the ancient individual easier to picture.
The reconstructed face gives researchers a rare look at how an early Homo sapiens may have appeared, with a heavy brow ridge and broad, rugged features. Researchers noted that skin color and hairstyle in the colored version are speculative and not based on direct fossil evidence.
While building the model, researchers also measured the interior of the skull and estimated a brain volume of about 1,364 milliliters (46.1 fl oz). That figure is close to earlier estimates for the same fossil and similar to the average size of a modern adult human brain.
To check their work, the team compared its digital skull with an independently scanned model made by another researcher and found the two closely matched, supporting the accuracy of the approximation.
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