A viral facial reconstruction of a 6,400 year old woman from Morocco’s Skhirat Rouazi site is facing criticism from the country’s top archaeology institute, whose director said the image was not based on rigorous scientific research.
“The skeleton of the woman mentioned in the report does indeed exist, but as far as I know, it has not been the subject of any rigorous scientific study aimed at reconstructing it,” Abdeljalil Bouzouggar, director of the National Institute of Archaeology and Heritage (INSAP), told Hespress English.
The facial reconstruction, Bouzouggar emphasized, “did not come from any scientific group and has not been published in any scientific journal.”
The Ancestral Whispers team presented a facial reconstruction last week based on the burial of an individual identified as skh001 from the Skhirat-Rouazi site.
The burial shows the woman lying on her back, slightly turned to the right, and oriented north–south. Her head was bent forward and turned slightly toward the northeast, with her body tightly positioned. Upper limbs were kept close to the torso, with the right forearm bent toward the face and the left resting near the pelvis, while the lower limbs were strongly flexed, with the heels drawn toward the buttocks.
The director of INSAP stressed that the platform behind the facial reconstruction is a commercial entity and relied on simple, publicly available online data, as it did in other projects.
“A full reconstruction of a face or skeleton requires extensive data, including a detailed study of the skull as well as genetic information, when available, to help determine features such as skin, hair, and eye color,” Bouzouggar added. Even when based on rigorous scientific methods, he explained, such “reconstructions can only be approximate,” especially when the remains are over 6,000 years old and key traits like skin tone and eye color remain largely speculative.
According to the Ancestral Whispers account on X, the platform offers paid commissions for facial reconstructions, with prices starting at $80 depending on complexity. It offers services including DNA reports, reflection, cranial reconstruction, and cartography, and states it has completed over 300 orders for more than 150 clients.
The platform already produced facial reconstructions of ancient human remains from archaeological sites across the world, including Nigeria, Turkey, Samara, and Latvia, with individuals dating back over 11,000 years.
The official noted that those behind facial reconstruction likely drew on existing research, including genetic studies showing that skeletal remains from the region carry the mitochondrial haplogroup M1a1b.
This lineage was relatively widespread in North Africa during that period and has also been identified in other parts of Africa and beyond, suggesting that “the region was open to interactions and exchanges with surrounding areas.”
The facial reconstruction of the 6,400-year-old woman from Skhirat-Rouazi, an area discovered in the late 1970s and early 1980s, consisting of a burial ground with over 80 human skeletons, including both adults and children, reflects a broader global trend of reconstructing very ancient human remains using advanced technologies, particularly AI.
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