See a fantastic, lifelike reconstruction of a woman from the Stone Age
A woman from the Stone Age who lived 4,000 years ago leans against her cane and looks ahead when a lively young boy runs out in a fantastic life-size reconstruction that is now shown in Sweden.
Although her resemblance is new – it debuted last month in one exhibition about ancient people at Västernorrland’s museum – researchers have known about this woman’s existence for almost a century. During the construction of a road in the village of Lagmansören in 1923, workers found her skeletal remains buried next to the remains of a child, probably a 7-year-old boy.
“With our eyes and perhaps at all times, people tend to believe that this is a mother and son,” says Oscar Nilsson, the Sweden-based forensic scientist who has spent 350 hours creating the realistic model. “They can be. Or they can be siblings: sister and brother. They can be relatives, or they can just be tribal friends. We do not know, because DNA was not so well preserved to establish this relationship. “
But when Nilsson shaped the woman’s posture and sculpted her face, he pretended she was close to her son who ran in front of her. “She looks with her mother’s eyes – both with love and a little discipline,” Nilsson told WordsSideKick.com. This stern but tender look looks like she’s about to call the boy and tell him to be careful.
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The Neolithic woman and the youth were buried in a cist grave, a burial built with long, flat stones in the shape of a coffin. The woman died in her late 20s or early 30s, and at 4 feet, 11 inches (150 centimeters) in height, “she was not a very tall person,” even for the Neolithic period, Nilsson said.
The woman’s remains showed no signs of malnutrition, injuries or diseases, although it is possible that she died of a disease that left no trace on her remains, Nilsson said. “She seems to have had a good life,” he said. She ate land-based food, a study of the isotopes (different versions of element) in her teeth revealed, which was strange considering that her grave was found near a fish-filled river near the shore, he said.
When Nilsson was commissioned to reconstruct the woman two years ago, he scanned her skull and made a copy of it with a 3D printer made of plastic. As with other reconstructions he has created, including those of one ancient Wari queen from what is now Peru and one Stone Age man whose head was found on a nail, Nilsson had to take into account the ancient individual’s gender, age, weight and ethnicity – factors that can affect the person’s facial tissue thickness and general appearance. But because the woman’s DNA was too degraded, he was not sure of her genetic background, hair or eye color.
So Nilsson took a qualified guess about her appearance. There were three major waves of migration into ancient Scandinavia: During the first, hunter-gatherers with dark skin arrived who tended to have blue eyes between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago; the second wave included pale-skinned, dark-haired, and brown-eyed peasants from the far south who moved north about 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, when this woman was alive; and the third wave included the Yamnaya culture (also spelled Yamna) from present-day Ukraine, which was a little darker in complexion than the peasants and brought with it the art of making metal when they arrived about 3,500 years ago, making them the first. The Bronze Age culture in the region, Nilsson said.
Based on these data, Nilsson gave the woman brown hair and eyes and fair skin like the farmers’. Nevertheless, the woman was not necessarily a full-time farmer; she probably participated in a mix of hunting and gathering as well as farming methods, he said.
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“We can not say with certainty if she lived a nomadic life, if she lived the life of the early peasants; it is impossible to say,” Nilsson said. “But we have chosen to make the safest interpretation, which is that she was both because, of course, there was a transition period of many hundreds of years when they left the old way of life.”
Stylish furs, stone age style
In the reconstruction, the woman from Lagmansören is dressed top to toe in fur and leather. This is a work by Helena Gjaerum, a Sweden-based independent archaeologist who uses Stone Age techniques to tan leather.
Before dressing the model, Gjaerum studied the ancient climate, landscape, vegetation and wildlife of the Neolithic Lagmansören. Based on what she discovered, she designed the woman’s clothes deer, Moose and Moose and the shoes out clean, beaver and Fox. The woman probably stuffed hay inside the shoes for padding, noted Gjaerum, who drew inspiration from clothes worn by indigenous Americans and indigenous Siberians, as well as leather clothes from Ismannen Özti mummy, who lived about 5,300 years ago in the Italian Alps.
Preparing the clothes involved hours of work. Gjaerum, who obtained real animal remains, scraped the meat off the skins and then put them in a river – a method that helps to loosen the fur from the skin. Then she scraped off the fur and threw on a solution made of moose brain, an oily mixture that binds to skin fibers. Without this mixture, the skin would solidify and easily rot if it got wet, she said.
The following steps involved massaging, boiling, stretching and smoking the skin and then finally designing the clothes. Gjaerum’s young son, who was about as tall as the Stone Age woman, served as a helpful model, Gjaerum said. She made the clothes as comfortable and practical as possible – for example by not putting a seam at the top of the shoulder, where water can seep in during rainy weather.
Modern people often think of Stone Age people as primitive, dressed in ugly, toga-like coats as in “The Far Side” series. But Gjaerum challenged that view. “I think it would be crazy to think she would have primitive clothes,” Gjaerum told WordsSideKick.com. “I wanted to make her dress that you could dress today” because you are both Homo sapiens.
Originally published on Live Science.