Researchers from the University of Melbourne have taken an ancient Egyptian mummy and brought her back to life by using 3D printer technology. It’s an interesting glimpse into an ancient culture that we still know very little about.
The mummy was actually found by mistake inside the university. Researchers suspect that the head might have been brought to the school in the early 1900s by Frederic Wood Jones, an archaeologist who eventually became an anatomy professor at the school.
The idea to reconstruct the face came from Ryan Jefferies, a museum curator who explained, that “her face is kept upright because it is more respectful that way. She was once a living person, just like all the human specimens that we have preserved here, and we can’t forget that.”
The skull was actually starting to rot from the inside, which prompted the decision to reconstruct the face in the first place.
Whether it be facts about the great pyramids in Egypt and other parts of the world that have still have no explanation, or their extreme intelligence in various subjects, crafts, and life skills, it’s also fascinating to ponder what once was, and could one day be again — perhaps in a different form.
[youtube id=”cyMYoPm4we0″]
‘Beauty’ Bias? Did She Really Look Like This?
One thing that instantly struck me was the western idea of beauty. A CT scan was used to see what was going on inside the skull, and they did reconstruct the face based on what they knew of the skull, bone structure, etc. A team of forensic experts from Monash University was also called in to help.
It was from these scans and the collaboration with the forensic experts that have researchers estimating the age of the skull to belong to a woman who lived around 300 BC.
Sure, the CT scans were about to create an exact replica of the skull, but as far as how the face looked, it offers a glimpse into a big problem: what we’ve come to perceive as beautiful.
We have an entire industry out there that thrives on making people feel ugly, or creating a near impossible type of image to maintain. The idea of what is and isn’t beautiful when it comes to the human body is thrown at us a lot. Pretty well everything in the mainstream media is geared towards it, either obviously through famous figures that they sell as sex symbols, or less obviously through the amounts of make-up that even an evening news anchor will wear to make themselves “camera ready.”
We all buy into this idea of “real beauty” that is being sold to us, to varying degrees.
Below is a great clip going more in-depth into the discussion.
[youtube id=”GMTI1n44On4″]
Comments 3