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 ..."
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| Source: via Twitter.com / Carmen Kean @keancarmi
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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.
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| 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.
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