Skulls Gain Virtual Faces

rw2 writes "Totally cool, The guys at Max Planck Institute for Computer Science have developed a way to reconstruct a persons appearence when a skull is found. When police find a skull and want to know what its owner looked like, they generally use artists who reconstruct the face by building up layers of clay over the skull."

Comments

Re:How accurate is it?

[LaMuk]

30 years ago when I was an Anthropology major, some of my professors built faces back for the Las Vegas police. Sometimes they would start with a skeleton that had been shattered into small pieces.

They were very good about telling age, sex, and race.

They taught us how it was done. Not that I remember much now. But the amount of tissue on the bones is figured out by how thick the bones got a t insertion points. The thicker the bones, the heavier the load.

Sex is easiest to tell by the pelvic bones, but also can be determined by size and shape of face bones. Size helped determine race. It got a little tricky if the bones were small. Was it because the person was female or Asian?

Still they were really good at it and their work identified victims of murders.