Brutally Murdered Pictish Man's Face Gets Digitally Recreated

Brutally Murdered Pictish Man's Face Gets Digitally Recreated
By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | February 22, 2017 01:12pm ET



he face of a 1,400-year-old murder victim is seeing the light of day, now that scientists have digitally reconstructed his features.

The victim, a young Pictish man, met a grisly end when he was brutally murdered in what is now modern Scotland. Archaeologists found the man's remains — placed in an odd, cross-legged position with rocks pinning down his arms and legs — during the excavation of a cave in the Black Isle, Ross-shire, in the Scottish Highlands.

The archaeologists sent the man's bones to the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID) at the University of Dundee in Australia. The team there, led by forensic anthropologist Sue Black, analyzed the bones and identified the horrific injuries the man had sustained, including five impacts that led to the fracturing of the man's face and skull. [The 25 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds on Earth]

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"This is a fascinating skeleton in a remarkable state of preservation, which has been expertly recovered," Black said in a statement. "From studying his remains, we learned a little about his short life, but much more about his violent death. As you can see from the facial reconstruction, he was a striking young man, but he met a very brutal end, suffering a minimum of five severe injuries to his head."

The man's injuries indicate that a tool with a circular cross section made the first injury "that broke his teeth on the right side," Black said. "The second may have been the same implement, used like a fighting stick, which broke his jaw on the left. The third resulted in fracturing to the back of his head as he fell from the blow to his jaw with a tremendous force, possibly onto a hard object, perhaps stone."

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