China restores appearance of million-year-old 'Yunxian Man' fossil

A Chinese museum recently put the restored look of two humans from roughly a million years ago on display.

The restored statues of a pair of fossil human skulls were unveiled by the Hubei Provincial Museum in central China on Thursday.

The two sets of ancient fossil human skulls were unearthed in 1989 and 1990 in Hubei Province. In 1994, paleoanthropologist Jia Lanpo named the fossils "Yunxian Man" after the location where they were excavated.

The analysis concluded that the fossils belonged to a Homo erectus male and a female aged between 25 and 45 and are around one million years old.

The brain volumes of the fossil skulls were 1,094 milliliters and 1,152 milliliters. Homo erectus were humans of medium stature that walked upright with lower braincases. They were possibly the ancestors of Homo sapiens, the modern humans.

The researchers from the Hubei Provincial Museum, Shanxi University, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan University, and Beijing Union University accurately reconstructed the fossil skull models using high-precision industrial scanners.

They used modeling techniques, such as sculpture, painting and computer images, to restore the faces of the skulls, including eyes, noses, mouths, ears, skin and hair.

The "Yunxian Man" fossilized skulls are the most complete ones in Eurasia of their era and provide key evidence for the study of the evolution of Homo erectus in East Asia, according to Science and Technology Daily on Thursday.

(With input from Xinhua)