Did cave men were real people? A new Senckenberg exhibition gives them everyday faces.
Today we constantly document our individual lives, sometimes on a hourly basis, using all king of media. Two generations back we don’t have color images of our grandparents. Six generations back there are no moving images.
More than one hundred generations back we even speculate about the existence of whole kingdoms, and science has to rely on preserved artifacts discovered from graves and excavations. Five hundred generations back and all we have are pieces of bones and stones to tell us about our ancestors.
But there is a direct blood line from people living back then, to us today. But our own, very personal story, is lost, and only a spotlight shows us the last few chapters.
In it’s new exhibition Museum Senckenberg now has re-created the faces, having borrowed reconstruction techniques from criminal investigators, and the result is incredible. If we would see them, in modern clothing, on the subway, would we recognize them as being 50.000 years old?
