How do we really see the world - our future, present and past - in the 21st Century?
Is it really we humans who now do the seeing?
It's only a matter of time that you can actually, when you make
lifelike reconstructions, to connect this with robots or computers.
This is the next step.
In the early 1980s, 87 graves of men, women and children
from the Mesolithic period were being excavated on Sweden's southern coast.
But one set of remains, known as Burial XXII, caught the eye of archaeologists.
This is the story of how an important figure
from our ancient past was brought vividly
back to life - by hand, but also by cutting-edge technology.
This is how our history is virtually talking to us.
It's strange to think that in the 7,000 years since Burial XXII,
as she is technically known, was alive, computers as we know them
have only been around for about 1% of that time.
But in the blink of an eye,
they are now not only defining what our future will look like,
but giving us incredible glimpses of our past straight
from the wildest dreams of historians from only a decade or two ago.
But let's get on with it, shall we?
Two key people in Burial XXII's reconstruction can tell you their stories.
As long as I can remember, I've been extremely fascinated by faces.
I have been making reconstructions for something like a bit more than 20 years now.
Reconstructions here in Sweden for the Vasa Museum
- the victims from the ship that sank, as well as a facial reconstruction
from a man buried in the stone circle of Stonehenge in Britain.
And also reconstructions for the Mary Rose.
I think I've made something like 80 or 85 reconstructions so far,
so it has become quite a lot of faces during these years.
I got a call from the museum in Trelleborg
with the Mesolithic woman.
As soon as I heard about the finding - about her specific individual
- the things that were found around her, it was impossible
to not get fascinated and to start planning for this.
This site in southwest Sweden dated back to the Mesolithic period,
aka the Middle Stone Age - a time of hunter-gatherer communities
who had gradually moved up into Scandinavia
from Central Europe after the last Ice Age.
But uncovering this fascinating discovery was just the first step.
Recreating a lifelike resemblance
from someone's 7,000-year-old remains wasn't going to be easy.
The first step when you make a reconstruction is to get a copy
of the skull that you are about to reconstruct the face of.
So, first of all, I need to make
a CT scan or a hand scan of this [skull].
I get very high quality 3D photo documentation
that can be processed on a computer.
And later on, you can print this with a 3D printer.
But once I have the copy of the skull, I can start to make an analysis
of what makes this person unique.
With help from an osteologist to establish the individual's sex,
age, ethnicity, an estimated weight,
Oscar painstakingly begins building the face in clay
- layer by layer, muscle by muscle,
all informed by his scientific knowledge of tissue depths, structure
and tiny clues revealed by the skull.
Incredibly, there are even techniques
to accurately recreate features such as the nose, mouth and eyes.
When our brains try to identify a face,
we seem to be very concentrated on the overall shape of the face
- if it's a long face or a more round face,
but also the proportions of the face
- the relation - the distance between eyes and mouth
and the nose in particular.
And when you think about it, all these things already are
in the cranium, in the skull.
So knowing this, I can produce a face that hopefully, if we could go back
in time, she would have been identified by her relatives
or friends, that they could see that,
yes, this is this woman.
So, this is the aim. I try to find this quality in the reconstruction.
The decision to reconstruct Burial XXII wasn't a random choice,
as the 1980s excavation found,
there was something mysterious, even special about the remains.
Deer antlers, animal teeth, buried sitting upright... so, just who is she?
It's a hard question this; who was she?
There is something going on here.
She must have been a person that is very important in her...
in her position, in her profession, so to speak.
Many people say that she could have been a shaman
or some kind of medical wise woman in her society, and in my eyes, yes.
When I make a reconstruction, it's extremely important
that I don't have an assumption from the beginning
that this is the face I want to make.
I have to be more like a bystander, really.
I let the technique and the skull guide me
or almost shape the face in front of me.
In many cases, I get astonished and surprised about how the face emerges.
You are very drawn to her eyes, to her intense look.
And I would say this is something that is actually already there in her skull.
So, what's next in the future for reconstructing our past?
No, I'm waiting for that still, but who knows, because you can make
3D reconstructions - movable in 3D on computers.
And this is already being made and I'm involved in a project like that.