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

Pretty neat

[stratjakt]

They've been doing this on every discovery channel special on mummies I've seen for the last year.

Most recently the Nefertiti one that I watched just the other night.

Not Scientific

[lawpoop]

We covered facial reconstructions in one of my archaeology classes. Basically it's guesswork and artistic interpretation.

Sure you have the facial bones, but you have no idea how thick their muscles were, how fleshy their skin was, lip size, what their eyebrows were like, eye color, eyelid characteristics.

There was one study where they gave the same skull model to five different artists and they got back 5 very different heads.

The only way you could to this accurately would be to decode any DNA you find and grow their face, virtually (or in some vat -- yech). The technology is a long way off, needless to say.