[Forensic Anthropology] Forensic Facial Reconstruction article

Dr Strange

From today's Irish Times:

Irish Times wrote:

Under reconstruction: how forensics put a face on Lambay skull
With an identification success rate of about 65 per cent, forensic facial reconstruction uses the small variations in the skull to re-create facial features, writes BETH O'DONOGHUE

THE DUBLIN county coroner this week repeated its request for information to help identify a human skull found off Lambay Island, Co Dublin, in 2006. Images of the head of the victim, a white man aged between 25 and 35, created using the skull were also reissued.

Can a skull provide enough information to produce such images? Are these images artistic guidelines or accurate portrayals of peoples’ facial features?

...

Full article here:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2010/1106/1224282775483.html

Doozie

Its really interesting to see that kind of thing. I recall a documentary I saw some years ago on the topic of facial reconstruction. It mentioned that the sculpturors creating the face had a subconscious style themselves when moulding muscle and skin onto the reconstructed skull. It mentioned the possiblity of them sculpting in a biased way, not intentionally of course but that they would create features based on how they themselves looked, or based on their own ethnicity. I cant remember much after that, but it was really amazing looking face to face at a dead person from however long ago.

Dr Strange

Yes, I am sure there are biases and also problems with population-specific standards. Most forensic facial artists would point out that they are not actually recreating a dead person's face but are trying to approximate it using certain population-standards. Some call it therefore facial approximation rather than reconstruction. It is usually a last attempt at identification trying to trigger a memory of something peculiar about someone's face, usually only one or two features such as the nose or chin or frontal teeth configuration.