Blast from the PAST

Last night I went to the 10th Standard Bank/PAST Phillip Tobias memorial lecture, titled The Ancestral Connection: Portraits of our Prehistoric Human Family, at the University of the Witwatersrand. Sounds like fun, huh? It does to me.

I belong to both the Palaeontological Society of Southern Africa (PAST) and the Trans-Vaal Branch of the South African Archaeological Society (ArchSoc). And I finally found someone who was willing to come with me to a PAST-sponsored lecture. Even my usually game-for-any-crazy-thing-I-suggest-to-do husband, when presented with an offer to attend a PAST or an ArchSoc lecture typically responds, "Have fun with that! Let me know how it was ..."

Source: via Twitter.com / Carmen Kean ‏@keancarmi

But Jonnie has a PhD in cultural anthropology and has dug in Namibia ... so she was my perfect date. Even though we were unfortunately greeted with a freakish, almost apocalyptic sandstorm blast before entering the Wits Great Hall followed by a poorly presented lecture on a fascinating subject. Then post-lecture, another blast - this time of frigid temperatures for our walk back to the parking lot. Not a great first date. Let's just hope she is willing to go for a second!

The topic for our date?  A talk on the reconstruction of the faces and bodies of our ancestors by Palaeoartist John Gurche. Gurche, whose reconstructions grace the Smithsonian Institution’s new Hall of Human Origins in Washington, DC as well as the American Museum of Natural History in NY and the Field Museum in Chicago, worked as a consultant on the set of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. He is kind of like a CSI criminal sketch artist. You know, the guys who draw what the perpetrator of a crime looks like? Except that instead of eye witness accounts and descriptions to guide the process, John uses the bones and skulls of hominid fossils and empirical data interpreted from the location of the find.

Wits is the perfect place to present such a talk as it is home to one of the world’s best collections of fossil hominids. And the cache is still growing. Lee Berger, the world-renowned American palaeoscientist, and an explorer-in-residence at NationalGeographic, who was in the audience last night, headed up the NationalGeographic Rising Star expedition which is considered “the richest early hominid site in South Africa, including Sterkfontein.” Gurche is also working on the Rising Star project, building ancient faces from Berger's discoveries.

As a Palaeoartist, John Gurche recreates strikingly realistic models of our ancestors. When it comes to palaeoscience, these researchers have to put together a puzzle without knowing much of the picture in advance, and Gurche in effect has to colour it in. He has been dissecting the faces of humans and great apes such as chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans for 30 years.

Gurche explained in a recent article in the Mail & Guardian that “the quest in these studies has always been to find ways of predicting soft tissues when all you have are bones. It turns out that there are quite a few soft tissue variables in members of this group [great apes and humans] that are correlated with bony variables, allowing their prediction for extinct forms. All of these individual predicted anatomical variables come together cumulatively in a face, and the final look of it is often something of a surprise to me.”

He starts with the fossil fragments, because these bones contain a wealth of information, such as the proportions of the hominid and the size of the muscles attached to the bone. Using these data, he creates a scaffold of metal and layers on the muscles using clay. Each rippled cord of muscle is individually attached.

his new book was for sale at the lecture

Gurche's background is in geology, focusing on palaeontology, and he has a masters degree in anthropology from the University of Kansas. And amazingly, except for his natural artistic proclivity, he has no formal training in art! But, Gurche says, there is more to being a palaeoartist than translating science into the tangible and visual. Gurche sees himself as a storyteller too. And to prove that claim, he read us a little from his new book Shaping Humanity.

I myself was far less interested in the art side of his reconstructions and more in the science side. He only gave one example of how he used empirical data in his renderings. The color of the skin of the Neanderthal he created for the Hall of Human Origins in DC. He deduced the shade of skin coloring based on the latitude of the find. Enough pigment to reduce the likelihood of skin cancer but not enough to prevent the absorption and production of essential vitamins through the skin.

Interesting. Too bad Gurche isn't a chemist too. That formula would make a great moisturizer.