Exclusive: Building the Face of a Newly Found Ancestor | National Geographic 

Oh my gosh, this looks like the ultimate dream job!

Some of the comments are so ignorant. Like us being an offshoot of Primates is somehow negative. This is a cousin of ours. Primates are amazing, smart adaptive creatures! We evolved smart enough to use the world around us instead of being subject to it and so did many other cousins of ours but unfortuneately we are the only offshoot that survived it all. Primates are amazing creations of nature and we are one of its top creations. Some people just want to be something special but only on their terms. We ARE special....we have survived and grown!

So fascinating , human like ancestor

This kind of science I love because it's a few things rolled into one. History, detective, science biology both human and animal, art, building, layering and the origins. This came for me from a love of reading.. feeding my mind with positive food for thought and what ifs.. helping to enlarge the possibility but also imagination.. feeding a hunger for truth because the application is so important for helping to show the complexity but also what lays outside of self.. yet still acknowledging self. Like a jigsaw puzzle that can be slowly pieced together for deeper understanding. Having a love for things that help others is a fantastic thing to have. It can help explain the changes within society of both human and animal.. the relationship between the two.. how environmental impact has changed our overall views on acceptability towards certain subjects. Helping to explain the why's of why we look different to each other or why the dietary or health impact has become what it has. Modern medicine in the scheme of things has become very heavily relied upon yet look at all that existed before that.. that's what I love about these kind of subjects though my mind starts to wander because of so many potential links and that can cause me to seem disinterested but in actual fact going down a different mind path than others. Sometimes I can be quick and other times I am slower but it's like digestion.. some things take longer to think about and can suddenly strike at the most seemingly unrelated moment.. yet even in that there must be a reason that particular thought is released at that particular point in time.

Wow really excited about this, a whole new question has been unveiled

Love these reconstructions! Will this be on display at the Natural History Museum in DCs Hall of Human Origins?

This is art.

Good to see him rebuilding the face of my friend

That's exactly what Iook like.

Absolutely awesome!!!

Amazing

Give him a hat.

Unbelievably Fascinating....

Thank you for loving them , enough and doing this. Could you tell us the blood 🩸 type please that would be so interesting 🧐

Magnifique!

this is pretty cool

Dawn of Humanity should make for a very interesting special on PBS --- I'll definitely watch!

cool!

This Jonh Gurche guy should do some of his work on those a oblong skulls from Peru or that star child too.

I know that guy. He sweeps floors down at the local barbershop.

Good job sir

BTW, Nice details!

Wow!!!!

I wish Nat Geo would stop giving fuel to creationists by claiming that H. naledi is an ancestor of H. sapiens. Ancestor has a very specific and clear meaning. Your cousin is not your ancestor.

What a beautiful face. I wish I could have met them ❤️

Sheeeeiiiit, we keepin' it real 2 million years, muhfugga!

how do I get this job? I'm an artist that loves history and the mystery of the pre human world. I think that this would be a great job for me, plus my curiosity of the past and how things came to be, would make my work be 1000× better!! oh gosh I want that job... or working to understand the ancestor-homo species in general.

at least we can rate that 70% of reconstruction is correct and the 30% is failure

WOW

2:23 that straight up looks like a gorillaz drawing

Madam Trousseau has nothing on John.

This is an abundance of wisdom. A kindred book I read changed my entire focus. "Temporal Echoes: Amelia's Odyssey Through Ancestral Shadows" by Vivian Rosewood

Give two paleoartists the same job, put them in separate rooms, and they'll come up with two completely different models. You cannot infer eye color, ear shape, lip aspects, nose profile, skin color, where hair is or isn't, or much else, from a skull alone. Take what you see as an artist's rendition, nothing more. Their influence over people who accept models like this as fact, and there are MANY, is shown by the way many publications report these assumed facial features as facts.

Well to all the nay sayers. DNA does not lie!

some of them do still exist today

Wow! Great job! How do you tell if this ancient ancestor had visible eye whites? (I hope you know what I mean, English isn't my native language). Humans are the only ones that show eye whites constantly, as far as I know. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I think, the better name is Prohomo naledi. New genus.

Wow just wow how many other homosapiens hybrids and normal ones are out there yet to be discovered by us their modern descendants this explains why men have beards XD

How do you know that it didn't have hair on it's whole body?

I was wondering what happened to my cousin Ernesto!

If Naledi isn't a Australopith/Erectus hybrid, I'll eat my hat.

This guys were conscious, probably much more than primates today, imagine that.

The nose reminds me of Don Cheadle.

ah! my dad! :D but... was he using piercing ? :D :D

OK, what is the mechanism by which a knuckle-walker can evolve into an upright biped? Please present the evidence to support your answer.

Anybody think Gurche's Homo erectus looks disturbingly real?

Since scientists have found mummified remains of Mammoths, is it possible to find mummified remains of early hominids? Or at least rock mummies with skin impressions sort of like scientists did with the Leonardo duck-billed dinosaur?

The orbital bone (brow) is severely exaggerated and the lack of a nose is as well. I'm just waiting on the DNA tests if there was any soft tissue found.

There are people that look like this today...

So then naia’s skin was seriously discolored.

But the nose and ears are soft tissue! So what percentage is conjecture?

یہ کسی بندر کی صورت ھو سکتی ہے انسان کو اللہ نے خوبصورت ڈھانچے میں بنایا ہے ہے ھو سکتا یہ بندر ہی مرے ھو اس کا ثبوت کیا ہے یہ انسان ہے

Looks like Columbo

Actually it's supposed to have very curly hair instead of straight hair.

They could be moneys from 100 YEARS AGO.. What makes you think that skull was one million years ago? Didn't they have 2 rows of teeth and a thick eye bridge?

dennis rodman

So he was guessing what this thing look like, he has some great sculpturing skills, but this is just his opinion of what this thing look like

Highly doubtful that Naledi is a human ancestor.

They're just as attractive as anyone else.

is that truck shepard on the thumbnail

With so many variables undetermined, couldn't the model be digitised (3D scanned) so that a digital artist could iterate other possible variations. Skin colour, hair features etc.

This ancient guy's hair might be curly.

Do they have the same genetic make up as humans? or more ape like? I don't know how to ask the right question, I don't quite understand why they call it a new species ? Also there was something called Continental Drift…how many years ago was that?

1:20 Me

Do facial reconstruction artists ever consider fat tissue on top of the muscle? It seems to me they don't

SATISFY YOUR MONK LOVE NG

They had hair under their eyes

maybe yours but not mine

Shouldnt his skin tone be darker? Doesnt look south african skin colour to me

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

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i dont know why the guy looks philipino?

Ancestor? LOL ok. Find the link first before you make that claim.

might look like??? so its no way accurate its still arbitrary

ASMR

These are NOT our ancestors.

It's interesting how biased speculation governs the imagination thats needed to do these reconstructions which are always presented in some scientific setting . Somehow these ape sized creatures with all their ape like features , from a complete skull to fragments of a jawbone or long ape like appendages always get fictionalized with more human like features based on nothing more then biased imagination. You'll always have the very limited body hair , or in this depiction we have the 70's sideburns. It's really on how to represent something that really would look like one of the great apes to look as human as possible , thus supporting this unscientific theory. I'm sure many of the modern forensic labs would love to have this guys services , since it's a very difficult task to establish a humans features even with all the real research and data thats been collected from study's of both live humans and cadavers. But that's the wonderful thing about evolution , since there's very little science that actually supports it , so you can just about make any type of speculation and present it as though it has some scientific merit without to many questions.

I think this nalidi-guy have in his time a proper modern hair cut..! Why not...they have sharpstone tools

They aren't extinct..I think I have run across some of them in my travels around the country ROFLMAO

creepy

Am I the first viewer?

This guy admitted this is guesswork . Almost human ? All art is interpretive .

You got the hair wrong remember this is Africa.

We don’t believe your Lies we are not from Apes Humans DNA 🧬 is Divine

Olmecs lol not

Gli africani sono ancora così 😏

Cool ugly Christmas sweater!

How is this an ancestor ? A cousin is not an ancestor.

Why would it have such a nose since there is no indication that their noses are like that since the middle part of the scull wasnt found it or why would it have tiny lips or wrinkles since it probably wouldnt live long enough, this is just a artistic view and not to be taken as seriously

In other words it's all a guessing game and you still have no idea

This would be worth watching if these evolutionists would say that "This is what we think it may have been like but we are not sure." Everything to the these evolutionists is spoken as if this is settled, absolute fact. Evolution has so many gaping holes in it that it is absolute folly to speak of it as if it is based in fact. Heck, there are people alive to day around the world that, if they died and one of these paleontologists got a hold of their skull, they could make it look like a "missing link." Furthermore, if these people died any kind of natural death and they were buried or exposed to the elements in a natural way, they would have turned to dust and not been preserved for even 50 years let alone millions.

is no.true illiminati. conspiration

Excuse me? You're making a guess???!! No guessing should be in this thing. It's either a fact or not.

Looks asian

the ancestor of african americans

Adam is my ancestor and he is human.

This is his imagination....he wasn't there to really see anything it makes me sad how this is a accepted it's his idea I make that face look diferent then him...

he looks just like Obama.😁😂

MICHELE OBAMA......

this guy admits he guesses how to create the features based on his preconceived ideas of evolution. total BS