A life-size reconstruction of a woman who lived 4,000 years ago is on display in Sweden.
Researchers have known about this woman for nearly a century, even though her likeness is new. The remains of a child and a woman were found next to each other during the construction of a road in the hamlet of Lagmans in 1923.
Oscar Nilsson, the Sweden-based forensic artist who spent 350 hours creating the realistic model, said that people tend to think that it is a mother and son. They could be siblings. They could be relatives or tribe friends. We don't know because the DNA was not well preserved to establish this relationship.
He pretended that the woman was near her son as he sculpted her face. This stern but tender gaze looks as if she is about to tell the boy to be careful.
See the faces of a man and a Neanderthal.
The Neolithic woman and youngster were buried in a cist grave, a burial made of long, flat stones in the shape of a coffin. The woman was not a very tall person and died in her late 20s or early 30s.
There were no signs of malnutrition, injury or diseases, although it is possible that she died of an illness that did not leave a mark on her remains. She ate land-based food, an examination of the isotopes in her teeth revealed, which was odd given that her grave was near a fish-filled river.
Two years ago, when he received the commission to reconstruct the woman, he scanned her skull and made a copy with a plastic 3D printer. The Stone Age man whose head was found on a spike had a sex, age, weight and ethnicity that had to be taken into account. He wasn't sure about the woman's genetic background, hair or eye color because her DNA was degraded.
She took an educated guess about her appearance. Between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers with dark skin who had blue eyes, and farmers from further south who were pale-skinned, dark-haired and brown-eyed, migrated into ancient Sweden.
The woman had brown hair and eyes, and light skin like the farmers. He said that the woman was likely involved in a mix of hunting and gathering as well as agricultural practices.
A man whose skull was found on a spike is getting facial recreation.
It is impossible to say for certain if she was living a nomadic life or the life of the early farmers.
There are 4 images, the first one is image 1 and the 2nd one is image 3.
In the reconstruction, the woman is wearing fur and leather. This is the work of an independent archaeologist who uses Stone Age techniques for tanning leather.
Before dressing the model, Gjaerum studied the ancient climate, landscape, vegetation and animal life. She designed the woman's clothes and shoes out of deer, moose, elk, and reindeer. Gjaerum took inspiration from clothing worn by Indigenous Americans and Indigenous Siberias, as well as the leather clothing of the Iceman mummy, who lived about 5,300 years ago.
It took hours of labor to prepare the clothes. The method Gjaerum used to remove the flesh from the skins was to put them in a river. She put on a solution made of moose brain after removing the fur. If the skin got wet, it would stiffen and rot.
After massaging, boiling, stretching and smoking the skins, the next step was designing the clothing. Gjaerum said that his son was the same height as the Stone Age woman and that he was a helpful model. She made the clothing as comfortable and practical as possible by not putting a seam at the top of the shoulder.
Stone Age humans are often seen as primitive, dressed in ugly, toga-like furs, as in The Far Side comics. Gjaerum said it would be crazy to think she would have primitive clothes.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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