What the boy from 5,500 BC looked like

"We hope that if someone who knew him in life saw this, they would recognise him," says Jenny Barber, an MSc student at the University of Dundee.

According to a Dailymail.co.uk report, Barber used cutting-edge police techniques usually used to reconstruct and identify decomposed bodies to rebuild the face of 15-year-old Viste Boy, who lived in the Vistehola cave near Stavanger in Norway 7,500 years ago in a clan of 10-15 people.

It's not the first time a 'face' from the Stone Age has been reconstructed but, as police techniques are continuously evolving, it may be one of the most accurate visions of what our ancestors looked like.

Barber used X-rays and laser scans of skull fragments to build a 3D computer model of the skull, with help from a digital model of the skull of a 15-year-old boy today.

Barber's scans were so detailed they threw up additional information about Viste Boy - that he suffered from a rare skull deformity, and that he was not sickly, as had previously been theorised. Barber's scans found a boy in good health at the time of his death. It's not clear what killed Viste Boy.

Barber created a 3D print of the digital model, using a rapid prototyping machine, and moulded a face made of clay over it.

She then took a 'negative' mould of the face, then created the fibreglass model.

Barber is studying forensic art.

Discovered in 1907, the Viste Boy represents the most complete Norwegian Stone Age skeleton. The Viste Boy's fragile skull is broken into fragments. Barber scanned the skull with a handheld laser scanner to build a 3D model of the Stone Age teenager

The Viste Boy's fragile skull is broken into fragments. Barber scanned the skull with a handheld laser scanner to build a 3D model of the Stone Age teenager

His dark-coloured skull and bones are currently on display in a glass case at the Archaeological Museum on the University of Stavanger (UiS).

Analyses show that the Viste Boy was 15 when he died. He stood a bit less than 1.25 metres tall and probably lived in a group of 10-15 people.

From their studies of rubbish in and around Vistehola, archaeologists determined that this clan ate fish – mostly cod – as well as oysters, mussels, cormorants, elk and wild pig.

They had also thought that the teenager might have been sickly, which would explain his early death, until Barber's research.

"The goal has been to create something as similar as possible to the original," explains Barber. "That's what facial reconstruction is all about – identification and recognition."

She has scanned the skull belonging to the long-dead youth with a laser surface scanner, which provided accurate data on his anatomy.

The cranium had suffered some damage, so the most complete side was duplicated.

Barber's work revealed that the Viste Boy had scaphocephaly (‘boat-head’), a congenital deformity which makes the skull long and narrow. She left the modelled head hairless to show this.

"The fact that the boy had scaphocephaly is a medical detail we hadn't observed before," says Mads Ravn, head of research at the Archaeological Museum.

"This reconstruction indicates that he must have been muscular, quite simply a robust person," she observes. So it's not certain that he was sickly, as people have thought.

"The bone analysis doesn't bear out such a diagnosis, and he has no other deformities that we know of other than the scaphocephaly."

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