Experts Reconstruct Face of Medieval Man with Dwarfism Excavated in Poland 33 Years Ago.
A research team, including two specialists, Marta Krenz-Niedbala and Sylwia Lukasik from Adam Mickiewicz University, explained how they created a 3D model of the skull of a man with dwarfism in a recently published study on the bioRxiv database, as reported by IFL Science on August 30. The skull was excavated from a cemetery in Lekno, Poland, in 1990, belonging to a Medieval man.
Reconstructed face of a 115 cm tall Medieval man. (Photo: bioRxiv).
Shortly after the excavation, experts diagnosed the individual with achondroplastic dwarfism (ACH)—the most common form of skeletal dysplasia, occurring in about 4 out of 100,000 births. The Medieval man died at around 30 to 45 years of age, stood 115 cm tall, and lived during the 9th to 11th centuries.
To reconstruct the face, the team lightly rotated the skull 360 degrees on a turntable and scanned it from various angles in real-time, collecting data about the entire skull, except for two loose teeth that were not scanned. After scanning the skull images, they added markers for soft tissue thickness at 31 anatomical points, using data obtained from ultrasound scans of living individuals.
To link the soft tissue and bone, the research team overlaid the facial scan of a living donor onto the ancient specimen. The donor did not have dwarfism, so the team had to deform the skull to make it compatible with that of the Medieval man.
“To our knowledge, this is the first facial reconstruction of an individual with dwarfism, making it a groundbreaking study of its kind in the world,” the experts stated.
The facial reconstruction technique is still in development but has been successfully applied to resurrect many figures from ancient times, helping scientists gain further insight into past human beings. In June, a new study published in the electronic journal OrtogOnline described how experts reconstructed the face of an individual from the species Homo floresiensis, a member of the genus Homo, which lived 50,000 years ago and is now extinct.
