Restoring Élisabeth Daynès’s sculptures
For the first time in an exhibition, prehistoric humans depicted with darker skin, hair and eye colors.
Restored hyper-realistic sculptures by Élisabeth Daynès
In the new Lascaux exhibition, we feature — for the very first time in an exhibition — prehistoric humans depicted with darker skin, hair and eye colors.
During the Upper Paleolithic in Europe, the features of Homo sapiens were very similar to ours: same cranial capacity, same brain, same morphology. However, a recent study from 2023 revealed that Europeans in the Upper Paleolithic still had dark skin.
That is why French artist Élisabeth Daynès, who specializes in the representation of humans from the past, has restored our four hyper-realistic sculptures from the Lascaux period: an old man, a woman, an adolescent girl and a young boy. For her, restoring a face and an identity to our distant ancestors is an artistic and scientific challenge. She works directly from fossilized remains, using casts provided by paleoanthropologists.
Analysis of ancient genomes shows that until around 15,000 BP, the skin, hair and eye colors of Europeans differed little from those of present-day East Africans. In the Mesolithic period, individuals with light-colored eyes were already present but their skin remained dark. This mutation appeared in the Near East and was brought to Europe by Neolithic farmers, which then accelerated skin lightening to promote vitamin D production. Until then, the consumption of offal and fatty fish had protected Paleolithic hunter-gatherers from a deficiency of this vitamin, which is essential for the absorption of calcium and phosphorus.
Jean-Jacques Hublin, paleoanthropologist, Chair of Paleoanthropology at the Collège de France.
