Scientists reconstruct the face of a hunter-gatherer who lived 10,500 years ago

She was buried in a cave above the Meuse River, and now she has a face and a name: Mos’anne. Scientists used bone, genes, and artifacts to rebuild the look and life of a woman who lived about 10,500 years ago in what is now Belgium.

Her story adds context to a turning point in European prehistory. It also shows how biology and archaeology work together to correct assumptions about early people.

Maïté Rivollat from Ghent University leads the genetic analysis within the ROAM project. The project brings together specialists in archaeology, bioanthropology, and art to better understand human variation after the Ice Age.

Uncovering Mos’anne’s ancient world

Mos’anne lived in the Mesolithic, the period after the last Ice Age when small bands of hunter-gatherers moved with the seasons. Evidence helps frame the picture of her wider population in Western Europe.

Her remains were found in 1988 in the Margaux Cave near Dinant. Excavations recovered the remains of seven to ten adult females, according to a 2011 study.

The burial context dates to the early Holocene, a time of warming forests and shifting wildlife. Recent radiocarbon work links these Belgian burials to that early Mesolithic timeline.

3D modeling meets DNA

Researchers created a 3D model of her skull and layered muscles, fat, and skin based on demographic averages for a middle-aged woman.

The 2011 report described how the team scanned the skull and estimated her age between 35 and 60.

The team also extracted ancient DNA from the dense petrous bone inside the skull. That tissue often preserves genetic material better than other parts of the skeleton.

A team of artists worked together to add hair, skin detail, and lived in features. Their craft follows anatomical rules and it respects the constraints that science sets when the data are uncertain.

Mos’anne’s appearance defies expectations

“We know that she had blue eyes and an average skin color. That’s striking; until now, most finds from that time indicated darker skin,” said Professor Isabelle De Groote of Ghent University.

Earlier research on hunter-gatherers helps explain why that mix is plausible. A study from Spain showed blue eyes in a man who still carried ancestral skin pigmentation alleles.

The Ghent team also compared Mos’anne to the Western Hunter-Gatherers, a population that includes England’s Cheddar Man.

The prediction for Mos’anne suggests variation within that group rather than a single uniform phenotype.

Life in the Meuse Valley

Archaeology fills in daily life around the face. The team tracked nearby plants and animals because diet and landscape shape bodies and choices.

The cave and nearby sites yielded shells, pigments, camps, and stone tools. Red ochre and charcoal appear in graves across the region, so the reconstruction includes those materials as personal decoration.

Seasonal travel likely connected river terraces, upland forests, and open camps. People carried efficient stone points and worked bone and antler into tools and ornaments.

Art meets archaeology

The necklace in the display is made from a deer tooth pierced with a stone tool and strung on plant fiber. Hair is tied with a leather band dyed with ochre, and charcoal marks trace simple geometric patterns.

These reconstructions come directly from physical traces on tools and bones found at the site and its neighbors, anchoring every detail in measurable evidence – even when artists must make small interpretive calls.

The Margaux assemblage stands out for its distinctive sex patterning across the burials, a signal of social rules for memory and status that remain unclear.

Cut marks on one skull point to postmortem handling likely tied to ritual, while pigment traces around cranial bones suggest bodies were prepared with care.

Together, these objects and traces hint at a community where adornment, symbolism, and treatment of the dead intertwined in ways that archaeologists are only beginning to piece together.

Ancient genomes defy simple stories

Skin color is influenced by many genes, diet, and sunlight exposure, and it did not shift all at once across Europe.

Early people did not share a single look, and Mos’anne shows that variation already existed in Western Europe before farming spread from the Near East.

This finding underscores the need to study regional histories rather than rely on oversimplified narratives.

Yet much remains uncertain. Genetic predictions for eye, hair, and skin rely on statistical models trained on living people, and ancient genomes do not always contain the same combinations or exert the same effect sizes.

Reconstructions of face shape use averages from modern samples matched by sex and age, while details such as hairstyle or ornament are still informed choices rather than fixed facts.

“Until now, the phenotypic diversity among European hunter-gatherers was only known from a small number of fossils and was thought to be fairly homogeneous,” said Dr. Rivollat.

Reconstructing lives, not bones

Seeing a specific person, not an anonymous skeleton, invites better questions about health, food, and social ties. It also gives museums a concrete way to test how the public understands uncertainty in science.

Facial models can be checked against new data as methods improve. That makes them living summaries of evidence, not static trophies under glass.

Stable isotopes in bone and teeth can estimate where someone grew up and what they ate across seasons. Those chemical fingerprints, paired with tool residues and pollen, can place Mos’anne within a tighter map and calendar.

Broader sampling across the Meuse burials could reveal kinship and social structure. It could also test whether the women shared diets, travel patterns, or health stresses that set them apart from nearby groups.

The study is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Image credit: ©2025 Kennis en Kennis.

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