After 1,500 years, scientists have reconstructed the face of a woman whose skull was once dubbed an “alien skull” due to its elongated shape. The skull, discovered in the 1970s in the village of Dully, Switzerland, was found to belong to a woman who passed away in the fifth century AD at around 40 years of age.
Cicero Moraes, the lead researcher of the study, clarified that the term “alien skulls” was a popular culture reference based on their distinctive appearance resulting from intentional cranial deformation practices. Using a 3D model of the skull provided by the Cantonal Museum of Archaeology and History, Moraes and his team reconstructed the woman’s facial features, including the mandible, eyes, nose, and mouth.
By utilizing tomography scans from women of European and Asian origins, the researchers digitally reconstructed the likely appearance of the woman’s face. The final image, created using digital techniques, portrays her with bald features in black and white to avoid subjective interpretations of her skin tone, hair color, and eye color.
Through their findings, the researchers highlighted the role of technology in connecting us with the past and illustrating cultural influences between distant societies. The study also delves into the potential reasons behind the skull deformation, speculating it may have been a cultural tradition transferred from Asian groups to the Burgundians, the woman’s likely community.
Despite the skull deformation, the woman’s health and brain volume seem unaffected, falling within the average range for women of that era. Mr. Moraes and his co-authors, including Luca and Alessandro Bezzi and Jiří Šindelář, are set to publish their study in the SSRN preprint repository before formal academic publication.
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