DNA from a mass grave found in Athens in the mid-1990s helped experts identify typhoid fever as a possible source of the plague that killed off one quarter of the city’s population in the fifth century  B.C. Now Manolis Papa­grig­or­­ak­is, the University of Athens or­­tho­dontist who published the typhoid discovery in 2006, has assisted in restoring the skull of an 11-year-old girl found in that same grave. Known as Myrtis, she is part of the exhi­bit “Myrtis: Face to Face with the Past” at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki in Greece until March 13. Her reconstruction, the first of a layperson from ancient Greece, is described in the January issue of Angle Orthodontist.

Papagrigorakis worked with Oscar Nilsson, an expert on facial reconstruction, who applied a technique often used in forensics that proceeds muscle by muscle. The skull provided the scaffolding for many of the  girl’s features, and her full set of teeth guided her lips. Richard Neave, who reconstructed Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, is often asked what people looked like in ancient times. Myrtis shows the world, he says, that “people haven’t changed.”

This article was originally published with the title She's 11, Going on 2,500.

2 Comments

1. 1. kristi276 10:47 PM 3/11/11

   The small span of biological time, a scant 2,500 years is just a second on the evolutionary clock, so how people looked whould not be all that different than how we are today. Are we that much diffent than some one during the last ice age? What about someone 20,000 years ago, or someone 200,000 years ago. We supposingly have 6 million years of evolution to look back on, we would be different if we looked back one million years ago. Then again what will we look like 2500 years from today, as to what we will look like one million years from now; if we are so luck as to not kill ourselves off in the mean time?

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2. 2. mkh 06:46 AM 8/9/11

   Indeed we probably haven't changed much in 2,500 years, but the reconstruction method is probably based on our features nowadays, so it is hard to expect different results. I wonder if the skull was typical to a specific race or ethnic group, or that that was an assumption.

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