Longlin 1 again!

The first version of the Longlin 1 skull was still made under the assumption, that this could be part of a new species. But meanwhile I am rather convinced, that he is quite in the middle of a normal range of east asian people.

On a blogsite I found this picture, supporting my estimation:
https://blogs.wellesley.edu/vanarsdale/files/2012/03/Slide2.jpg

in another blog Maju commented:
     " I think that the nose of both Longlin and Mai Da Nuoc have remarkably small triangular nasal holes and neither have the "bridge" of the nose (nasal bone) too prominent. They could well have noses similar to those of modern East Asians: rather flat and small but actually most modern Mongoloids have broader nose holes and these are remarkably small and triangular. I've tried to find comparisons but no luck but they must have got very small noses, probably narrow, as well as very strongly marked cheeks. "

As I offered open to correct me in my partly exeggerated approaches of selfmade reconstructions I made a second version of Longlin 1.

Homo Mousteriensis Hauseri faces

Reflections about the uncertainties of reconstruction

In my first high school year at the age of ten I could enjoy a privileged status concerning Biology. My appreciated teacher Dr. Krieger knew to use my drawing abilities for his lessons at a time without tons of copies and without a beamer, giving me his private books to blow up the illustrations with color charcoal on a board of one to three square meters. I remember gigantic drawings of single cells, plants and insects. In the huge archive of the biology collection I first met the famous skull of one of the latest Neanderthal people, found 1908 in Moustier, Dordogne and considered to have lived about 40000 years ago. I met him again in 2005 in the Anatomy Institute of Cologne, hold him in hands, made a drawing and quickly noticed, that he must be wrong recomposed (done by Hermann Klaatsch, Breslau).

In 2005 I ommited to do a more detailed drawing and added it now, imagining, this could be a half bald man with freckles and full of testosterone. The green sculpture, I found some days ago, obviously is based on the wrong replica too.

I made a second drawing trying to correct the exaggerated prolonging of the face. This replica was probably spreaded throughout Europe a thousand times, being the first complete skull of a Neanderthal man, giving a chance to visualize this new species. Otto Hauser was not only a skilled amateur archaeologue, but also very good at promoting and merchandising his findings.

It was a luck, that they divided the original parts (brown) from the additions (grey - the small skull in the upper left). A study by Thomson, I later found, which worked with computer tomography, recombining all known pieces into a plausible skull, showed no significant difference to my initial sketching. 

After looking for a possible version of the newly found Maludong skull I remembered my own elder reflections about the subjectivity of reconstructions. Even when we face a complete skull without errors like above and can turn him around in hands, we know nothing about all the fleshy and psychic facts, that determine a person. We can only guess, wether he is healthy or sick, vivid or timid, selfconfident, kind or mean, bright or dull, handsome or ugly. The simple fact, that there sometimes is only one version of a head - and often a very expensive one, when a sculpture - can lead to the misleading impression, if you have a scientific method like "Three millimeters flesh on the cheekbones", you will automatically reach an objective version of a skull. The truth is far from that!
The most important determinants for an empathic and real looking version is a well founded prejudice, a guiding idea. I simply played with those possibilities to show, that we could imagine our famous Hauseri skull both as european or rather african or asian.

At http://s4.zetaboards.com/Sciences_and_History/forum/3841977/
I opened up a thread to discuss this and to start a project, I will offer to run series of drawings after your proposals.

Maludong versions

collecting different possibilities of ancient faces will perhaps create a weird thing like a "morphological difference" to head for probable faces without anatomical proof like those of Denisovans!

Two actual versions of the Maludong samples. Not that far away, I think!