ViewTube

. 

Anthropological Reconstruction of Santa Claus Gains Popularity on Social Media

You probably know that the jolly bearded man in the red hat has a real-life prototype – Bishop Nicholas of Myra, also known as Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker. Though legendary, he appears to have been a real person who lived in the 3rd-4th centuries and died in 345 AD in the city of Myra, located in present-day Turkey. According to tradition, Nicholas had a habit of secretly leaving gifts for those in need. On one occasion, he slipped a purse of money into the house of a poor man who was about to sell one of his daughters into a brothel. According to legend, Nicholas dropped the purse down the chimney, and it landed in a stocking drying by the fireplace.

Over the centuries, Nicholas’s popularity among Christians grew. By the late 11th century, Myra, where his relics were kept, was under Turkish Muslim control. It is reported that in 1087, a group of sailors from the Italian city of Bari, disguised as pilgrims, entered the church where his relics were stored, broke into the tomb, and stole most of the remains, bringing them back to Italy. A basilica dedicated to Saint Nicholas was built in Bari shortly thereafter, attracting pilgrims. (A legend even arose that Nicholas, while passing through Bari during his lifetime, predicted: “Here my bones will rest.” Convenient, isn’t it?)

In 1096, during the First Crusade, Venetians stole the remaining bones and took them to Venice, to the island of Lido.

Centuries passed. The legend of "Sinterklaas" became popular in the Netherlands and later spread to colonies, including New Amsterdam, now known as New York. Saint Nicholas evolved into Santa Claus – an old man who punished misbehaving children and rewarded those who were good.

The image of Santa Claus as we know him today was shaped by an illustration by Thomas Nast, published in Harper’s Weekly in early 1863. This image was inspired by the poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas," written by an unknown author in 1823 (attributed to either Clement Clarke Moore or Henry Livingston). The poem mentions flying reindeer-drawn sleighs, chimney entry, and a sack of toys.

In 1931, Coca-Cola launched an ad campaign featuring illustrations by Haddon Sundblom, depicting a fully modern Santa Claus – a cheerful, plump bearded man in red attire trimmed with white fur and a red hat. (Though Coca-Cola wasn’t the first company to use Santa’s image in advertising.) Interestingly, the canonical image of Russia’s Ded Moroz (Father Frost) was also finalized in the 1930s.

Now, let’s talk anthropology. In the early 1950s, renovations began at the Basilica of Saint Nicholas in Bari, requiring the crypt containing the relics to be opened. Dr. Luigi Martino analyzed the bones, sketching three views of the skull and creating a graphic reconstruction of Nicholas’s appearance. This was the first attempt at producing a portrait of Nicholas. The analysis indicated he was about 60 years old at the time of death, stood 167 cm tall, and had a slightly elongated skull, broad face, and protruding chin. Dr. Martino noted that Nicholas’s nose had been severely broken and healed asymmetrically.

In 1992, Dr. Martino was invited to examine remains attributed to Nicholas kept in Venice, on the island of Lido. Surprisingly, the examination revealed that the bones from Bari and Lido belonged to the same individual.

In the early 21st century, British forensic expert Caroline Wilkinson took on the task of reconstructing Saint Nicholas’s face, using measurements and photographs of the skull rather than the physical remains. In 2014, a virtual reconstruction was unveiled, created with 3D technology by Face Lab.

Ten years later, Brazilian expert Cicero Moraes produced a new portrait of Santa Claus. Using existing images, he built a 3D skull model and overlaid soft tissues based on statistical data for modern men aged 60-69. Several image variations were created, including an artistic version with added visual details – skin and eye color, a thick white beard, and clothing.

The resulting portrait quickly went viral on social media. Moraes, like Dr. Martino, noted Nicholas’s asymmetrical nose. Interestingly, the new portrait bears a striking resemblance to Thomas Nast’s 1863 depiction – the same broad, kind face.

What do you think? Does it look like Santa to you? 

Historical Figures Brought To life. Vol. 16. You Haven't Seen Anything Like This Before! 

This man and woman lived in Britain over 2,000 years ago. Tightly swaddled, they were buried in barrows.

Danes Graves is an archaeological site in East Yorkshire belonging to the Arras culture of the British Iron Age (500 BC-70 BC). This ancient necropolis comprises a number of burial mounds.

Excavations have been carried out here since the 18th century, although no records survive of the first attempts to excavate the barrows. Apparently, archaeologists of both the XVIII and XIX centuries were not too careful. When once again scholars wanted to excavate at Daines, the landowner forbade them to do so because previous investigations had been ‘carried out so recklessly, so carelessly and even so indecently - the graves were not even backfilled’.

At the end of the XIX century, the next large-scale excavations began, in the process of which another 53 barrows were added to the dozens of barrows already studied. The diameter of the burials ranged from 3 to 10 metres. The graves are shallow, and the height of the mounds did not exceed 1 metre.

Archaeologists found 114 skeletons. In some graves they found jewellery - bracelets, beads, pins, belts, as well as pottery. One of the burials contained a chariot with horse harness. The burials are mostly single, although in one case a child was buried together with an elderly man.

A peculiarity of this necropolis is that the skeletons were in a stooped position, with knees pressed to the chin. Perhaps the bodies were buried tightly swaddled. A number of male and female skulls from the barrows are described. 

This post is not recommended for our impressionable subscribers. It is about a traditional souvenir from Ecuador - a shrunken human head.

Tzanzas are shrunken heads, or rather, the soft tissues of heads from which the skull has been removed. The ritual of making tzanza existed in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest - the Shuar, Achuar, Awajun and some others. Shrunken heads look peculiar: due to the compression of soft tissues, facial features are distorted.

Indian groups living in the Amazon valley have been competing for land and resources for centuries, leading to armed conflicts. After defeating their enemies in battle, they would be beheaded and bring the heads back to their settlement to be turned into tzanz. The warrior's greatest fear was that the spirit of the dead man might harm the murderer; to prevent this, the soul must be trapped. Since the Amazon Indians believed that the soul resided in the head, the best way was to dry it and carry it around. This will curb the enemy's spirit and even make it serve the wearer.

The process of creating a shrunken head began with the removal of the skull. The lips were sewn up and the mouth was fastened with pins. To keep the shape, a wooden ball was placed inside. The head was then boiled in water with herbs containing tannins. Then the head was dried with hot stones and sand, rubbed with ashes and decorated with beads. A hole was made in the top of the head, through which a thread was passed so that the trophy could be carried around. Some heads were exhibited at feasts and displayed, others were thrown away or even given to children as toys. 

Europeans first encountered tsantsa in the 16th century, when Spanish conquistadors arrived in the New World. The bizarre trophy quickly attracted the attention of collectors. European ‘bounty hunters’ arrived in the border regions of Ecuador and Peru, ready to buy tsantsa or exchange them for goods. In the 19th century, tsantsas were in demand as souvenirs in Europe and the United States. Collectors often traded the trophies for guns, at a rate of one gun per head. These weapons were used to extract new heads: some Amazonian Indians began to kill people on purpose in order to obtain tsantsa for sale. Others began to make fake tsantsa, using corpses from morgues, monkey heads and sloths. Experts report that up to 80 per cent of dried heads in collections are fake.

Back in the 1930s, tzanza could be bought for $25 a piece. But then the governments of Ecuador and Peru outlawed the trade in dried heads.

Nevertheless, already in the mid-20th century, the traveller Thor Heyerdahl wrote that it was difficult to get to some parts of Ecuador: locals refused to lead scientists there for fear of tsanza hunters.

In 1999, the National Museum of the American Indian returned the shrunken heads from its collection to Ecuador. Most other countries have banned the trade in human heads. Currently, replicas of the shrunken heads made from animal skins are sold as souvenirs. 

In 2012, Tobias Houlton, a forensic scientist at the University of Dundee, reconstructed a dried tsanz head kept in a collection in Scotland. To restore the original shape, he experimented with pig skin, studying how the drying process affects the properties of the soft tissue. Houlton concluded that, for example, nasal cartilage does not shrink when dried, retaining its original shape. Based on the fact that the head belonged to a young warrior, Houlton reconstructed the appearance of this person using the methodology used by forensic scientists.

In 2018, renowned British anthropologist-reconstructor Caroline Wilkinson did similar work. The reconstruction was part of a study of 65 tsants held in museum collections. The study found that all of the heads studied were human, with some possibly belonging to Europeans or Africans rather than Native Americans. Experts estimate that only 6 heads turned out to be authentic ceremonial tzanzas; most of the rest were made for sale, sometimes using modern tools.

For the reconstruction, Wilkinson chose a well-preserved head from the collection of the Science Museum in London. The head belonged to an adult male. 

This man lived over 4,000 years ago in Scotland. His life was short and almost nothing is known about it, but now he is the oldest resident of Stirling.

In 1872, workers extracting gravel from a hill in a small garden in the village of Torbrex, near Stirling, came across an unusual structure made of stones, which turned out to be an ancient burial mound. Inside the mound was a stone box, and in it the skeleton of a man. The remains were transferred to a museum, and the burial was forgotten until 1969, when the land was sold for the construction of a new house. Before the construction started, the burial site was excavated. Having studied the stone embankment with dimensions of 27 by 16 m, archaeologists found another box with a burial. Apart from the skeleton of a woman aged 20-23, the box contained the remains of a 4-year-old child and a clay vessel. The stone mound probably represented an ancient family cemetery. One would like to think that the man and woman were husband and wife and the child was their son or daughter, but in fact, the first and second burials may be separated by decades or even hundreds of years.

The man was about 25 years old at the time of death. The skeleton was badly damaged, part of the skull was missing, and the bones of the left leg were burnt - possibly the marks of partial cremation. There were similar marks on the female skeleton.

Archaeologists believe that the burials belong to the Late Bronze Age. In 2017, the male skeleton was radiocarbon dated, establishing that the man died between 2152 and 2021 BC, meaning he is more than 4,000 years old. Stirling's oldest resident has been named ‘Tam of Torbrex’.

Emily McCulloch, a forensic scientist from the University of Dundee, worked for 6 months to reconstruct ‘Tam's’ appearance. The result was a portrait of a man very similar to modern Scotsmen. 

This young woman died in a Scottish monastery 700 years ago.

Research into the skeleton of a medieval woman buried on a bed of shells at Whithorn Priory is part of an ambitious Cold Case Whithorn project. As part of the project, experts are re-‘unearthing’ Whithorn's archaeological archives, which include 52,000 objects.

It is believed that the first Christian commune in Whithorn (Scotland) emerged as early as 450 AD, so that this place is called the Scottish ‘Cradle of Christianity’. The monastery was founded in the middle of XII century and flourished for several centuries.

Archaeological excavations here began as early as 1886, and by the end of the 20th century a vast collection of material had accumulated. A new project, organised in 2018, includes radiocarbon dating of human remains, as well as stable isotope studies and DNA analysis to elucidate the dietary patterns of the monastery's inhabitants and their origins.

Anthropologist Chris Rinn has reconstructed the appearance of a 20-year-old woman buried at Whithorn in the 14th century, among lay people, based on a 3D copy of a skull. 

Have you watched our new video yet? 

Hey friends!

As creators and content authors of the Equator AI channel, we understand that some of the AI-generated images in our videos show historical figures with makeup or long painted nails, which may not be historically accurate. We know our ancestors didn’t follow these modern trends, but we’re hopeful that AI will continue to improve and account for these details over time. We kindly ask for your understanding and patience as the technology evolves. Thank you so much for your continued support! 

This shaman woman was buried with an infant, who was not her child, 9,000 years ago.

We have already written about the famous burial of a Mesolithic woman in Bad Dürrenberg (Central Germany), but new details have emerged. 
This ancient grave was discovered during sewage works in 1934. The burial struck the discoverers with a rich inventory. A female skeleton was sitting upright, squatting, and between her thighs lay the bones of a baby. Everything was covered with a layer of red ochre. 

The grave contained jewellery made of deer, auroch and boar teeth, stone tools, flint microliths in a crane bone container, bone and horn objects, fragments of three turtle shells and river mollusk shells. The burial is still considered one of the richest Mesolithic graves in Germany. 

After World War II, the find was forgotten for a long time, and remembered in the XXI century. In 2019, specialists conducted new excavations, and the skeleton of the woman was examined in detail. In autumn 2022, the book ‘The Mystery of the Shaman’ was published, entirely devoted to the monument in Bad Dürrenberg.

At the time of her death, the woman was 30-35 years old and 165 cm tall. No decay was found on her teeth, but the first incisors of the upper jaw were so erased that the tooth canals were exposed. The woman had probably been using her teeth very actively as tools. The result was an inflammation that affected the entire jaw. It's believed that this may have eventually led to the woman's death.

Judging from the abnormalities of the cervical vertebrae, the woman suffered from neck problems that made it impossible to turn and bend her head. The idea is that certain head positions clamped an artery, resulting in an impaired blood supply to the brain. This means that the woman could move her head to quickly render herself semi-conscious. A property valuable to someone who communicates with otherworldly forces! This, as well as the presence in the burial of two headdresses made of reindeer antlers, led archaeologists to assume that the woman was some kind of shaman.

The baby's skeleton is poorly preserved. At the time of death, the poor thing was not yet a year old. DNA analysis showed that the child was a boy, who was not a close relative of the woman. So why was the baby buried with her? It's a mystery.

Geneticists also found that the woman had blue eyes, dark hair and dark skin - a typical set-up for Mesolithic hunters in Western Europe.

Surprisingly, the burial appears to have been visited by humans for a very long time. Some items were found to have been placed in the grave 600 years after the woman's death.