Scientists thought it was a man: what does a woman who lived 31,000 years ago look like

In 1881, archaeologists discovered the skull of a man buried in a cave in the village of Mladeč on the territory

modern Czech Republic.At the time, researchers dated the skull, saying it was approximately 31,000 years old and belonged to a man. A new study has shown that they were wrong: the remains belong to a woman who lived during the Stone Age.

Experts corrected the mistake that scientists made140 years ago. It turned out that the so-called Mladeč 1 skull belonged to a 17-year-old woman who lived during the Aurignacian period. It belongs to the Upper Paleolithic (approximately 43,000 to 26,000 years old). The scientists published their findings as part of a new online book, A Forensic Approach to the Study of the Mladeč 1 Skull. In it, experts detailed how scientists had reclassified the sex of “one of the oldest Homo sapiens found in Europe.”

The researchers used line projection,corresponding to the boundaries of soft tissues and bone structures, to create an approximation of the face. Image Credit: Cicero Moraes/Jiri Sindelar/Karel Drbal

For re-identification, scientists usedinformation collected during 19th-century archaeological excavations, forensic facial reconstructions performed by researchers in the 1930s, and CT scans to create a digitized image of the skull. Since the lower jaw was missing, experts turned to existing data on modern human jaws. So they filled in the blanks about what this person might have looked like.

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