Unearthed Mystery: The Stunning Face of a 10,500-Year-Old Stone Age Woman from Belgium Revealed
Reconstructing A Stone Age Woman’s Face
The remains of the Stone Age woman were first discovered in 1988 during excavations in Margaux cave near Dinant, Belgium. The discovery was intriguing, as the woman was found buried with several other women — and not with men and children, as is more common with Stone Age burials — but researchers didn’t yet have the tools to study her DNA.
That changed this year, thanks to a project led by Ghent University. After analyzing the Stone Age woman’s DNA, researchers worked with Kennis and Kennis Reconstructions to recreate her face.
The woman’s skull showed that she had a high nasal bridge and strong brow ridges, and her DNA revealed that she was between the ages of 35 and 60 when she died. Scientists also used her DNA to determine that she had dark hair, dark skin, and blue eyes.
Kennis and Kennis ReconstructionsA 3D reconstruction of the Stone Age woman’s face, alongside her skull.
The fact that the woman had dark skin is not surprising to researchers — most ancient people in Europe, including the famous “Cheddar Man,” also had dark skin. However, the Stone Age woman had slightly lighter skin than other remains uncovered from the same time period, which struck researchers as important and intriguing.
Her skin tone is a “subtle but important detail,” Maïté Rivollat, the chief geneticist of the project, remarked in a Ghent University statement.
Rivollat continued: “Until now, the phenotypic diversity among European hunter-gatherers was only known from a small number of fossils and was thought to be fairly homogeneous.”
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