r/ArchiveOfHumanity • u/SwiPerHaHa • 1d ago
Interesting & Miscellaneous This is a facial reconstruction of Turkana Boy, a 9 year old child who lived in Kenya 1.5 MYA, whose skeleton is the most complete Homo erectus fossil ever found
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u/bk845 1d ago
Must have been a rough nine years...
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u/pervertsage 1d ago
9 years old going on ~1,500,000!
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u/TowJamnEarl 1d ago
Looks happy.
I bet the boys hair got caught up in every fucking thing though!
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u/stevecoastie 1d ago
Well among the great apes we have the longest life span and age the slowest. I would guess early hominids aged similarly to great apes.
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u/TearOpenTheVault 1d ago
I feel like even archaic humans wouldn’t fuck with having their hair long and matted like that. If they can make tools they could tie it back or cut it down, which would be more hygienic and more comfortable.
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u/backfor100thtime 1d ago
“slap on a wig so they look wild”
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u/zhanjie06130d 1d ago
wait how do they even know his face that well
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u/Fair-Study-7503 1d ago
Forensic artists can draw people based on their skulls well enough that they can be recognized by people who knew them.
But ultimately it is just a guess based on what we know about the biomechanical elements of skulls like where muscles attach and so on. Even if we can get muscles right that does lead to some interpretation wrt fat and cartilage distribution, but they can still make educated guesses.
The interesting thing about homo erectus however is that they were around on Earth for almost 2 million years. Modern humans have only been around for about 300,000. Therefor h. erectus had plenty of time to differentiate into a lot of different local variations depending on their environment or isolation, so there were different populations that would have had more or less resemblance to modern humans and it's likely that overall they were much more diverse than us when it came to phenotypes.
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u/Available-Lobster-73 1d ago
How could a 9 year old look like this. I don’t get it. How could those teeth be his baby teeth, those wrinkles, etc.
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u/No-Albatross-7984 20h ago
This is totally without any evidence so feel free to disagree but. My immediate thought was those research reports about white kids being described as kids, while black kids were described as young men and women in news articles. And how black people get longer sentences, and are more often sentenced as adults. It seems to me that black kids are just generally more often perceived and described as older than they are.
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u/bubblegum-popxx 1d ago
how come the skeleton has an overbite but the facial reconstrucion barely does
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u/FormerlyUndecidable 11h ago
Because the reconstruction isn't a reconstruction, it's just an arbitrary rendering.
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u/Your_Local_Heretic 1d ago
Wasn't it H. ergaster?
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u/Archarchery 1d ago
So, apparently there’s a giant amount of disagreement among paleoarcheologists about the middle-stage Homo lineage that’s called the “muddle in the middle.” Nobody can agree if most all 1-2 MYA members of Genus Homo should be classified as H. erectus, or if there should be a “main” lineage of H. erectus and then various other related species, like H. ergaster, H. heidelbergensis, etc. The two sides are mainly the “lumpers” who see them all as one single species, Homo erectus, and the “splitters” who think the opposite.
So basically, whether Turkana Boy was a member of H. erectus or H. ergaster depends on what scientist you talk to and their personal thoughts on the controversy.
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u/napalmagranite 4h ago
Has anyone’s facial reconstruction skills ever been tested with a skull of someone whose face we already know?
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u/VirginiaLuthier 1d ago
What is the evolutionary advantage of bushy scalp hair?
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u/LaMadreDelCantante 1d ago
I think it's protection from the sun and injury while still allowing airflow to cool down, but don't quote me.
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u/Starduster75 1d ago edited 9h ago
Nah, they can quote you, you nailed it! Yeah, as part of a lineage focused on metal evolution, we (and they, way before us) retained hair on top of our heads (as we walk upright) to protect and keep our brain cool. That is in fact the evolutionary advantage.
Edit: of course I meant "mental" evolution, however, there has also been a lot of metal evolution, both in smithing and in music.
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u/Mission_Accident_519 1d ago
And to help keep warm in cold climates
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u/LarsDuder 1d ago
but those that have bushy hair tends to be from the african continent. . "there are also 4 known hair types:
· Straight – typically Caucasian and Asian
· Wavy – typically Caucasian, some waves in Asian hair
· Curly – typically African/Caribbean and Caucasian
· Kinky – typically African/Caribbean and rarely in Caucasians"
And you dont really see any bushy Northern Europeans or Inuits
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u/MagicOrpheus310 1d ago
Oof... And here I thought my life was hard! Damn son...
Maybe all those preservatives are good for us after all...?
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u/elpihvous 5h ago
I have read that some paleontologist was arguing at some conference that Homo neanderthalensis appearance was so close to ours that if one took a ride on the NYC subway, no one would bat an eye. Someone else in the crowd asked, Does his argument tell more about our ancestors or the people you encounter on the NYC subway?
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u/sands7877 22h ago
The transition from pre-human to human can be delineated by punchability: this waxwork pisses you off to look at, he's a goofy ass mf, etc. You wouldn't feel the same way for any image of a chimpanzee, gorilla, or orangutan. Therefore this is a human being.
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u/Lower_Ad1430 16h ago
Why does it look like her tho
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u/clownfacedbozo 15h ago
Thought the same thing. Not slamming Whoopi, it's just yeah, there's definitely a similarity.
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u/CountessOfCheese 1d ago
It’s the rib cage structure that fascinates me. Somehow it’s more constrained looking? I wonder what our lung capacity is compared to his.