"The swaggering 2,300-year-old Slonk Hill Man"
January 25, 2019 1:50 PM   Subscribe

 
Stafford Road Man, a.k.a. Saxon David Crosby.
posted by pipeski at 2:40 PM on January 25, 2019 [8 favorites]


I love these. It's so nice to see reconstructions of people smiling, I found it oddly moving.
posted by stillnocturnal at 2:43 PM on January 25, 2019 [4 favorites]


From my front door, I can look north across the valley to what remains of an Iron Age hillfort. Slonk Hill Man, no doubt, would have been familiar with it in its heyday. He looks like a Brighton type.
posted by doornoise at 3:18 PM on January 25, 2019 [3 favorites]


Slonk Hill Man once tried to fight me in a bid to win over my wife in a pub. He was a right nutter.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 3:22 PM on January 25, 2019 [14 favorites]


We can’t accurately identify skin color or facial features (to pinpoint suspects) from the DNA found at fresh crime scenes, but we can identify these traits from remains that are thousands of years old? I’m so confused.
posted by mylittlepoppet at 3:28 PM on January 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


Of all of them, Patcham Woman's the one I'd expect to see walking down an English high-street. Amazing work on all of them.
posted by Leon at 3:36 PM on January 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


The Nat. Geo. site won't load on my ipad 3, but I read a Guardian article last year that said the builders of Stonehenge were dark skinned and blue eyed, and left very few DNA traces in their immediate successors, which I thought was tragic.
posted by jamjam at 3:53 PM on January 25, 2019


We can’t accurately identify skin color or facial features (to pinpoint suspects) from the DNA found at fresh crime scenes, but we can identify these traits from remains that are thousands of years old? I’m so confused.

They've got the skulls to do facial features from. And... just pulling this out of my fundament, but... I think they can make guesses about skin and hair color from DNA well enough to make an useful image for a generation of kids to gawk at. But criminal matters imply a very different need for proof and certainty.
posted by wotsac at 4:13 PM on January 25, 2019 [3 favorites]


We can’t accurately identify skin color or facial features (to pinpoint suspects) from the DNA found at fresh crime scenes, but we can identify these traits from remains that are thousands of years old? I’m so confused.

I'm no scientist, but maybe there's just more to work with in even an old skull than in a few drops of blood or skin flakes? Or maybe the standards are a bit lower - you don't have to worry about getting innocent old Stafford Road Man put away for a crime he didn't commit.
posted by AdamCSnider at 4:21 PM on January 25, 2019 [3 favorites]


sadly, because of budget cuts, forensic departments rarely swab crime scenes for intact skulls these days
posted by prize bull octorok at 4:28 PM on January 25, 2019 [12 favorites]


These are incredible. Thanks for posting.
posted by john_snow at 6:04 PM on January 25, 2019


If I had to guess I'd say that while you won't find a specific marker for dark skin or brown eyes, you might find close matches to living people who have those things.

But it would probably be smart to wait for someone with a gram of credibility to weigh in.
posted by klanawa at 6:17 PM on January 25, 2019


Slonk Hill man is quite handsome. I'd be willing to do some knapping with him.
posted by BlueHorse at 6:52 PM on January 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


The neanderthal facial recreation they threw in for fun is highly accurate- I often have that lightly confused facial expression.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 7:15 PM on January 25, 2019 [5 favorites]


I'm finding these all really repulsive. A bit too Uncanny Valley, or maybe I find their "come hither" looks threatening on a subconscious level.
posted by heatherlogan at 7:20 PM on January 25, 2019


Cheddar Man, on the other hand, is pretty cute. Or maybe I'm biased by my undying love of English cheddar...
posted by heatherlogan at 7:23 PM on January 25, 2019 [2 favorites]


I know these are part science/part artistic license but I find them so moving.
posted by not_the_water at 7:26 PM on January 25, 2019 [2 favorites]


Speaking as an anth person and a professional neanderthal, I feel that's why these sorts of things are important. We're never going to have 100% perfect facial recreations without some sort of breakthrough in IDK genome imaging? It's just not going to happen. So no matter what there is a smidgen or two of artistic license. But instead of the old style dour cavemen, these recreations paint these long gone people as... people! People have smirks, grins, grimaces and lightly confused facial expressions! I feel like having empathy for people and past peoples is important, and that's why I love the new style of facial recreations- It's like a window into the past we all descend from.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:06 PM on January 25, 2019 [13 favorites]


I really, really, really wish I could ever know exactly what Neanderthals and their contemporary H. sapiens people thought about each other. The biological concept of species obviously didn't exist back then, but H. sapiens at least (and primates more generally, much of the time) seems primed to divide into groups, so I have to imagine there was a certain amount of "Us and Them" going on, culturally speaking. Neanderthals are just so obviously people, despite belonging to a different species—if you saw one on the street you might think they looked a little odd, but you wouldn't peg them as non-human.

Yet they had a separate heritage from us, reaching back at least half a million years (for reference, biologically modern humans only go back about 100,000 years). That period of overlap just seems like one of the most fascinating (and perhaps tragic, given that it ended with the Neanderthals' extinction) periods in the history of our species. I've often thought that humans might be gentler on the earth if we didn't feel so separate from the rest of nature, and that maybe we wouldn't feel so separate if we had other members of our own genus running around, like us but not quite the same.

Anyway, it's just something that fascinates me and it's frustrating that there's so little left from that time. We can make some educated guesses here and there, but it's impossible to really know what it was like, or what Neanderthals themselves were like.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:00 AM on January 26, 2019 [5 favorites]


Patcham Woman looks familiar, like someone I might know. These faces are all so individual and haunting.
posted by mermayd at 6:30 AM on January 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


Check out the story House of Bones by Robert Silverberg for a poignant answer to "but what were they really like?"
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:19 PM on January 26, 2019


If I had to guess I'd say that while you won't find a specific marker for dark skin or brown eyes, you might find close matches to living people who have those things.


Things like pigmentation are polygenic; given sufficient genomic data it's possible to determine them with a high degree of probability although not certainty. There's a paper here about a system for forensic phenotyping, which is available online here; if you have data from a personal genomics company like 23andMe you can input your own values to test for accuracy (I do and did, and it gave me a high probability of blue eyes, fair to intermediate skintone, and light brown hair, which is mostly accurate; my eyes are hazel, more blue than green, with a gold ring around the iris).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 5:59 PM on January 26, 2019


Pseudonymous Cognomen has fantasy demigod eyes.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:11 PM on January 26, 2019


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