John Gurche, a “paleo-artist,” has recreated strikingly realistic heads of our earliest human ancestors for a new exhibit
Australopithecus africanusThis species lived about 2.5 million years ago and, like A. afarensis, is thought by some paleoanthropologists to be one of our direct ancestors.
“I wanted to get an expression that captures something that both humans and great apes do, though the meaning is a little different,” Gurche says. “I wanted to build a smile, but a smile with a lot of tension in it. You might even call it a nervous smile, like the fear grin of the chimpanzee.”
