MORE ON THE FACIAL RECONSTRUCTION of ancient Palestinian Jews:

Tel Aviv University researcher reconstructs ancient Israelite faces
By ISRAEL21c staff
January 18, 2009

Prof. Eugene Kobyliansky keeps two busts in his office. One represents the face of an average male Jew in ancient Israel from 332 to 37 B.C.E; the other is a composite face for Jewish women from the ancient Roman era (37 B.C.E. to 324 C.E.).

"It's like looking into a time machine, going back 2,000 years, to visit these people," says Kobyliansky.

Kobyliansky, of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, is the first researcher in the world to provide facial reconstructions of what Jews looked like in the land of Israel, before their exile into the Diaspora.

Using bone measurements collected from skulls at Jewish burial sites at Ein Gedi near the Dead Sea and the Jordan River, Kobyliansky created plastic molds on which to base the facial reconstructions. The technique was made possible through a unique forensics lab in Moscow, at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which uses the most up-to-date software in anthropological facial reconstruction to recreate facial features from craniums with about 70 percent accuracy.

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An earlier article noted that a female skull had some African features and drew perhaps unwarrantedly broad conclusions from it. This article is more cautious and gives what may be a more plausible explanation:

... The female skull also exhibits all the Mediterranean features but, in addition, there are probably some African traits, as manifested by the shape of the nose and face.

"This woman certainly had some African intermixture," Kobyliansky explains. "We know from history and the stories of King Solomon that there were Ethiopian Jews in Israel. In this particular female, we see some African traits. But maybe she was absolutely white in color. It's impossible to say."