Homo floresiensis

"Homo floresiensis ("Flores Man"; nicknamed "hobbit" and "Flo") is widely believed to be an extinct species in the genus Homo. The remains of an individual that would have stood about 3.5 feet (1.1 m) in height were discovered in 2003 on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Partial skeletons of nine individuals have been recovered, including one complete skull, referred to as LB1"

This is the incipit of the Wikipedia page dedicate to the Homo floresiensis. I started the post with this sentence because today I will share the result of our research about Archaeological Foresic Facial Reconstruction (AFFR) of the individual LB1 of this species, performed for the open source exhibition "Facce. I molti volti della storia umana". If you are a regular reader of tis blog, you will know that we attempted already a facial reconstruction of the "hobbit", as he was one oh the Hominini we worked on for the Brazilian exposition "Faces de Evolução" (curated by Prof. Dr. Moacir Elias Santos of the Archaeological Museum of Ponta Grossa and Prof. Esp. Vivian Tedardi of Rosicrucian and Egyptian Museum in Brazil). Like it happened for the Taung Child (Australopithecus africanus), also in this case we developed a new model (v 2.0), after a first reconstruction, simply based on a an anatomical study and on basic paleo-artistic techniques.
Here below you can see the image of the first reconstructive model (H. floresiensis v. 1.0), while here you can read the old ATOR post about this first attempt.

Homo floresiensis version 1.0

After the first model, we changed completely our approach to paleo-art, as we developed the new technique based on the anatomical deformation of Pan troglodytes or Homo sapiens ct x-ray scan (depending of the kind of hominid to be reconstructed). The result of this new approach is the H. floresiensis new model (v. 2.0) we release today and that you can see in the image below.

Homo floresiensis version 2.0

Also in this case, the model is the result of a team work. Here below are the credits:

1. 3D scan of the cast: Moacir Elias Santos (Archaeological Museum of Ponta Grossa)

2. 3D modeling (skull restoration, anatomical study, CT deformation): +Cícero Moraes (Arc-Team) with the precious contribute of Prof. Peter Brown (New England University in Armidale, Australia)

3. scientific validation: Prof. Telmo Pievani (University of Padua, Department of Biology), Dott. Nicola Carrara(Anthropological Museum of the University of Padua), Prof. Peter Brown (New England University in Armidale, Australia)

The image of the new model of Homo floresiensis has just been added on Wikimedia Commons and it is avalible for any use under the CC-BY license (which we use normally for the material we share through ATOR).

Have a nice day!

The meaning of an "open source exhibition"

As many of you know, since more than one year we are working on the exhibition "Facce. I molti volti della storia umana". Now that the exhibition was inaugurated and our work is completed, it is time to share with open licenses (CC-BY) what we produced. 

It will be a long process, as the materials are different (images, photos, video, 3D models), nevertheless we have to start uploading the documents. Thanks to a short discussion with +Maurizio Napolitano (Fondazione Bruno Kessler) and +Rodrigo Padula (Grupo Wikimedia Brasileiro de Educação e Pesquisa), both expert in open data, I think that the best solution will be to upload the data directly in ATOR, where I can cite all the people who participated in the "production process", from 3D scan to facial reconstruction, till scientific validation.

IMHO the best image to start with is the one of the Taung Child, for different reason: it has been the first attempt performed by our team in order to reconstruct the face of an hominid; it summarizes our concept of Open Research; it has been one of the ideas that gave birth to exhibition "Facce", as Dr. Nicola Carrara conceived it; it is the first project in which Arc-Team, the Anthropological Museum of the University of Padua and Antrocom worked together; last but not least, it is a perfect example of what we mean of open data. Indeed the first reconstruction we produced (version 1.0), which actually is already part of the related article in Wikipedia, has been modified after the development (and the validation) of a new technique of paleo-art, based on the anatomical deformation of a CT scan of a Pan troglodytes. For this reason now we have a new and more accurate reconstruction, which can be considered a version 2.0 of the same model. 

The open data we intend to share here in ATOR are meant to be open not only in the direction of free access for everyone, but also (most important) under the temporal dimension: they should just represent a step of a continuous evolution of the research, in which all the reconstructions can be considerate simply as the latest release of a model (exactly like in software development, with new versions and forks). For this reason we choose the Creative Commons Attribution license, in order to allow derived works and projects.

The two images below can explain better this concept: the first one represent the Taung Child reconstruction in his first version (based on an anatomical study of primates), while the second one is derived by the anatomical deformation of Pan troglodytes CT scan.

The first version of the reconstruction of the Taung Child

The second version of the Taung Child

Both of the models are the result of a team work, although most of the process (and in particular the most important and delicate phases) has been performed by the 3D artist  +Cícero Moraes. Here below I want to cite the credits for this reconstruction (following the same order of the work-flow):

1. 3D scan of the cast: Luca Bezzi (Arc-Team) and +Moreno Tiziani (Antrocom)

2. 3D modeling (skull restoration, anatomical study, CT deformation): +Cícero Moraes (Arc-Team)

3. scientific validation: Prof. Telmo Pievani (University of Padua, Department of Biology) and Dott. Nicola Carrara(Anthropological Museum of the University of Padua)

Acknowledgement:

The Anthropological Museum of the University of Pauda, for providing the cast of the fossil.

The KUPRI, Primate Research Institute Kyoto University, for sharing the CT scans of different primates.

Dr. Claudio Paluani (University of Padua), who, during the lesson "Digital bones" at the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua, had the same idea we had about the validation of the methodology of anatomical deformation through the modification of two CT scans of living primates. This fact convinced us to perform the test, after seeing that more people reached the same conclusion about the validation problem.