In our evolutionary kin we see faces both strange and familiar—visibly different from us but marked with an instantly recognizable psychological inner fire. The re-creations are the work of paleoartist John Gurche at the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, New York. He has been sculpting extinct humans since he was a child, when he first became fascinated with evolution. “When you’re a kid and you love something, you do art about it,” he says. “I just never stopped.”
To create these lifelike busts, Gurche starts with a plastic or plaster cast of the most complete skull available for each species, typically provided by an expert in the field. Then he goes to work on the face—beginning, surprisingly, with the eyes, which he crafts from layers of acrylic plastic. “The most difficult part is getting a feeling of life in the eyes,” he says. “You have to feel a presence behind them.” Next he adds muscle, cartilage, and fat features using clay. Gurche infers the size and shape of soft tissues in the face from skull dimensions and estimated body weight, using comparative measurements gleaned from the decades he has spent dissecting humans and ape species. “It’s a quest to find out what this face was like,” he says. “I do it by the numbers, building very slowly.”
