Scientists Rebuild the Face of a 16,000-Year-Old Woman

What did a person look like 16,000 years ago in southern China? A new digital reconstruction gives one of the clearest answers yet, built from an almost complete skull discovered in a cave.

A Skull From Yahuai Cave

The skull comes from Yahuai Cave in Bolang Village, Long’an County, in China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Archaeologists from the Guangxi Institute of Cultural Relics Protection and Archaeology excavated the site across three seasons between 2015 and 2018, uncovering a burial area that included a nearly complete cranium, a partial mandible, and other skeletal remains. A stone found resting on top of the skull may have been placed there deliberately, echoing burial customs seen at nearby Neolithic sites. Radiocarbon dating placed the skull at roughly 16,000 years old, from the tail end of the Late Pleistocene.

Rebuilding a Face From Bone

Fossil preparator Jianjun Zhang manually reconstructed the fragmented skull in 2017, piecing together each fragment and using plaster to fill in missing sections like the nasal opening. Years later, an international team from Guangxi Normal University, Beijing Normal University, and Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in the UK took that reconstructed skull and used geometric morphometrics and 3D computer graphics to estimate what the individual’s face may have looked like, comparing it against a dataset of 81 contemporary Han Chinese adults.

A Skull Unlike Modern Skulls

The analysis found that the Yahuai skull differs measurably from modern human skulls. Based on features like a perpendicular, elevated frontal bone and small mastoid processes, researchers believe the individual was a young adult female. Her skull was larger and more robust than modern female skulls in the comparison dataset, though still smaller than male skulls from the same era, with a smoother surface, weaker temporal lines, a developed brow, and a pointed chin.

What the Face Reveals

The reconstructed face carries a high forehead, narrow eyes, and full lips, features that researchers say align closely with modern human faces despite the underlying skull’s distinct proportions. Xie Guangmao, one of the researchers involved in excavating the site, said studying the skull helps build a better understanding of the physical characteristics of early humans in southern China and how they may have migrated and spread across the region.

Sources

This report draws on findings published in the Journal of Archaeological Science by Shui, Xie, He, and colleagues.