China now10,000 years ago, the boy's face, a non-Neandertha, was it wrong?
Uncover the face of ancient humans! The bioarchaeology team of Jilin University cooperated with Russian universities to successfully restore the fossilized skull of an 8-9-year-old Neanderthal boy from 300,000 to 40,000 years ago using self-developed digital technology.
This archaeological achievement detonated the hot search on the Internet yesterday, let us witness the miracle of history together! "
The boy's appearance does not seem to bear much resemblance to a Neanderthals. The most striking features of Neanderthals are high brow arches, flat foreheads, and receding chins.
However, he looks more like a modern man. Could it be that something went wrong during the restoration? Searching on the web, there is no other description of the matter except for this news released by Xinhua News Agency.
But nothing can stump me. I tried searching with the keywords "1938" and "Neanderthals", and the first page of results was all about Neanderthals and images of their skulls.
The child, Taishik-Tash 1, was discovered in 1938 in the Taishik-Tash cave in the Bajsuntau Mountains of Uzbekistan.
He was found in a shallow pit with his skull crushed into 150 pieces and a horn core of 5 pairs of ibat horns around it. Scientists speculate that the child may have been buried with a ritual.
Through dental analysis, the researchers believed that he was a boy between the ages of 8 and 11, but the specific date of death was inferred to be between 300,000 and 40,000 years ago, based on the skull, archaeology and the surrounding fauna, which is indeed a bit large.
Although the skull was larger than that of modern children of the same age, this was due to the fact that Neanderthals had a faster growth rate. Although it has typical Neanderthal features, there are also some modern human features, which has led scholars to argue that it may be closer to late Homo sapiens.
However, upon further mtDNA analysis, we concluded that the skull did indeed belong to Neanderthals. It is worth mentioning that the skull was once reconstructed by the Soviet anthropologist and sculptor Mikhail Gerasimov, who believes that the remains may have belonged to a **-year-old girl.
His reconstruction appears to be more consistent with Neanderthal characteristics.
The digital 3D avatar restored by Jilin University is closer to the real appearance, but the authenticity of the 8-year-old is debatable. Because some studies have questioned that he was a late Homo sapiens, the real avatar should also reflect this trait.
Neanderthals were prehistoric humans who went extinct about 30,000 years ago, and they were mixed with Homo sapiens, and about 2% of humans outside of Africa today carry Neanderthal genes.
Neanderthals were stronger and had more brains than Homo sapiens, and the mystery of their extinction is puzzling.
The reasons for the extinction of Neanderthals are varied, with some suggesting that abrupt changes in the climate caused them to hide in caves, lack of contact between groups and increased inbreeding, and competition from modern Homo sapiens eventually led to their disappearance.
It has also been suggested that the Neanderthals were genetically inferior and led to their gradual assimilation by modern Homo sapiens, rather than simply extinction. The question is as open to the scientific community as to whether Neanderthals are a separate race, and some believe that it should be classified as a subspecies of Homo sapiens.
If you want to learn more about Neanderthals, you can check out "Neanderthals" by 2022 Nobel Laureate in Medicine Svante Pääbo, who re-explored the path of human evolution using modern molecular methods.
The original price is 69 yuan, and it only costs 49 yuan here.