The Fine Art of Facial Reconstruction

The finished face of the “Nariokotome boy” can be used as a teaching aid with which to compare future findings.  The finished reconstruction will permit scientists and laypersons from fields outside Paleoanthropology to study the morphology of H. ergaster and perhaps (as has been shown in the past) add to our knowledge of these early hominids.

A model of the Nariokatome skull (left) and the reconstructed model with the eyes and nose cartilage in place (right).

       The reconstruction process begins with a casting which was made from the fossilized remains of KNM-WT-15000 (the designation of the Nariokotome Boy). The next step is to rebuild the damage of 1.6 million years of neglect. The skull is resculpted; voids are filled and the missing nasal bones, Zygomatics, and Super orbital torus, are rebuilt.  The eyes are created and put into place. Then, using modeling clay, the soft tissue is laid on.

     There are two basic methods of reconstruction developed for use in Forensic Science. The first could be called the "American Method" which uses known facial depths on certain points of the skull, they then fill in the voids with a sort if latticework of clay to approximate the face. The second method can be termed "the Gerasimov Method" that builds up the musculature of the face and then places a skin over that to approximate the face (The Gerasimov method was developed by the late Russian paleontologist Mikhail Gerasimov).  Both schools produce similar basic results. For this reconstruction, I decided to use an amalgam of both methods: I used tissue depth thicknesses recently gathered of modern W. Africans, placed tissue depth markers, and then built up the musculature according to the Gerasimov method.

     With the markers in place, I centered the eyes in the sockets and roughed out the size of the nose and mouth. Forensic science has developed many methods to determine the profile of the nose. One approach, used primarily by the American school, estimates the projection of the nose at three times the length of a bony spur located beneath the nasal opening in the skull. The width of the nostril wings is a set distance from the lateral edges of the nasal openings, six millimeters for Europeans and Asians and eight millimeters for Africans. The Gerasimov school creates the outline of the nose by extending one line from the bridge of the nose and a second line from the floor of the nasal opening, and then rounding their point of intersection to make the tip of the nose. They estimate nose width as 1.67 times the width of the nasal opening. The width of the mouth is either the distance between the inner edges of the irises in the eyes or the distance between the lateral edges of the canine teeth, all of these measurements typically have the same result.