Scientists reconstructed the facial features of the first European, using a fragment of skull and a jawbone found in Romania. Although it doesn’t look at all like the nowadays Europeans the reconstructed man or woman lived in the forests of the Carpathian Mountains.
The bones were found in Pestera cu Oase (”The Bones Cave”) in 2002 (the lower jawbone) and in 2003 (the fragments of the skull). The radiocarbon analysis showed that the bones are somewhere between 34,000 and 36,000 years old, times when both the Neanderthal man and Homo sapiens inhabited the lands.
The sex of the person’s whose bones were found in Romania could not be determined. One of the things that raised controversies was the color of the skin, that was claimed to be darker than modern-day Europeans, due to the known facts that Homo sapiens migrated to Europe from Africa via the Middle East.
Anyway the BBC 2 series The Incredible Human Journey which documents human origins and evolution was a major factor in the reconstruction of the first modern European, as they want to show us the way that migratory routes helped us populate Earth.
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