A face in the crowd
What does a 3000-year-old face look like? Japanese scientists have just found out, and have revealed how a woman from one of Fiji’s earliest settlements looked.
The skeleton was found three years ago in the south of Moturiki Island in Fiji. The experts at Kyoto University reconstructed her face using some complex computer modelling, and also established she had lived around 800 BC and died at about 50 years old, quite a bit older than most of the Island’s residents at the time.
They calculated that she had stood 5'3 - 5'4 tall, she was probably right-handed and had given birth at least once. She would have been a member of the pioneering Lapita people, who spread through South-east Asia passing through Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, inhabiting Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Tonga, Samoa and Fiji.
Their seafaring descendants later continued on through Polynesia and eventually to New Zealand.
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