Weathered face of 'old man' Neanderthal comes to life in amazing new facial reconstruction

In 1908, a group of Catholic priests discovered what looked like the skeletal remains of a man buried inside a cave in La Chapelle-aux-Saints, a commune in south-central France. The nearly complete skeleton lacked several teeth, earning him the nickname the “old man.”

However, further investigation by scientists revealed that the skeleton wasn’t a modern human (Homo sapiens) but rather a Neanderthal, a close relative that went extinct approximately 40,000 years ago.

The skeleton had many hallmark traits of a Neanderthal, including an oversize brow ridge, a flat cranial base and large eye orbits, according to eFossils.com, a site run by the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Anthropology.

Now, 115 years later, forensic artists have created a digital facial approximation of the Neanderthal, who lived to be about 40 years old, offering a glimpse of what he may have looked like when he lived sometime between 47,000 and 56,000 years ago, according to a new facial approximation that researchers unveiled at a conference presented by the Italian Ministry of Culture in October.