What an Average Ancient Greek Looked Like
ancientgreekgirl
Museumgoers get their first glimpse of an average resident of ancient Greece.
DNA from a mass grave found in Athens in the mid-1990s helped experts identify typhoid fever as a possible source of the plague that killed off one quarter of the city’s population in the fifth century B.C. Now Manolis Papagrigorakis, the University of Athens orthodontist who published the typhoid discovery in 2006, has assisted in restoring the skull of an 11-year-old girl found in that same grave. Known as Myrtis, she is part of the exhibit “Myrtis: Face to Face with the Past” at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki in Greece until March 13. Her reconstruction, the first of a layperson from ancient Greece, is described in the January issue of Angle Orthodontist.
read the rest of the story at Scientific American:
(photo credit: Yiorgos Karahalis Reuters)
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