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Thomas Aquinas' skull reveals appearance and cause of death

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Re: Thomas Aquinas' skull reveals appearance and cause of death

#11

Post by thaumasiotes »

biohcacker84 wrote: post #6
WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding facial reconstruction from skulls is a well-defined process in forensics, so it's likely that they used standard methods. They mentioned getting colors (i.e. skin/hair tone) from painting.

I'd love to see facial reconstruction of people of whom we have pictures and video. Since what I've heard of facial reconstruction is that there is a lot "art" in it.

It would also be nice to see police sketch artist renderings compared with the people they depict.

I've noticed that people rarely seem to see much value in testing procedures against questions with known answers.

Re: Thomas Aquinas' skull reveals appearance and cause of death

#12

Post by shakna »

WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #3
ggm wrote: post #2

Hypothesised cranial haematoma after accident with tree, died aged 48. Reconstruction aligns with paintings, but it wasn't clear if the reconstruction model was informed by the paintings so somewhat meaningless they agree. Also the diagnosis isn't informed by the craniometry from what I can read: it's a reconstruction and an unconnected diagnosis from reports of his death. Amusingly a website which had (nc)register.c…

From my understanding facial reconstruction from skulls is a well-defined process in forensics, so it's likely that they used standard methods. They mentioned getting colors (i.e. skin/hair tone) from painting.

I can't really sum it up better than the Wikipedia page's author:

> It is easily the most subjective—as well as one of the most controversial—techniques in the field of forensic anthropology.

Re: Thomas Aquinas' skull reveals appearance and cause of death

#14

Post by pbh101 »

ggm wrote: post #2

Hypothesised cranial haematoma after accident with tree, died aged 48. Reconstruction aligns with paintings, but it wasn't clear if the reconstruction model was informed by the paintings so somewhat meaningless they agree. Also the diagnosis isn't informed by the craniometry from what I can read: it's a reconstruction and an unconnected diagnosis from reports of his death. Amusingly a website which had (nc)register.c…

What’s amusing about two different sites being named ’Register’? It is a relatively common newspaper name suffix like ‘Times’ or ‘Post.’ Or is there something else I’m missing?

Re: Thomas Aquinas' skull reveals appearance and cause of death

#15

Post by jjmarr »

darkwater wrote: post #13

So, they discarded the form of the face coming from iconography BUT used the colors like hair and skin. This is SO catholic (well, or religious in general).

Aquinas was born in central Italy during the High Middle Ages. What hair and skin colour do you think he had?

Re: Thomas Aquinas' skull reveals appearance and cause of death

#16

Post by madaxe_again »

jjmarr wrote: post #15
darkwater wrote: post #13

So, they discarded the form of the face coming from iconography BUT used the colors like hair and skin. This is SO catholic (well, or religious in general).

Aquinas was born in central Italy during the High Middle Ages. What hair and skin colour do you think he had?

Italy had and still has a pretty diverse makeup - Germanic peoples from the north, North Africans from the south, and Mediterranean peoples who are the crossroads of the two.

Where I live in the torturous mountains of the north of Portugal, people from villages all of five kilometres apart can look radically different. Our nearest village is your fairly standard Iberian phenotype - dark brown to black hair, and tanned looking. Across the valley is a village that took in Jews fleeing the inquisition - and they look Sephardic to this day. Ten kilometers north is a village still named in local dialect “Moorish village”, and lo and behold, the people there look Arabic.

So what was his phenotype? Only going to find that out by sequencing him. He probably had dark skin and hair, but he could have been blonde and pale.

Re: Thomas Aquinas' skull reveals appearance and cause of death

#17

Post by defrost »

jjmarr wrote: post #15
darkwater wrote: post #13

So, they discarded the form of the face coming from iconography BUT used the colors like hair and skin. This is SO catholic (well, or religious in general).

Aquinas was born in central Italy during the High Middle Ages. What hair and skin colour do you think he had?

Was his family from the Northern or Southern Italian lines?

Did his family include any of the many far off bloodlines bought into Italy via the Roman Empire creating far flung citizens?

As the peer comment states, there's a wealth of pigments in Italy, and that goes back before the High Middle Ages.

The earliest evidence of Italians' extraordinary genetic diversity dates back to the end of the last glacial period

https://www.unibo.it/en/news-and-events/notice-board/the-ear...

Re: Thomas Aquinas' skull reveals appearance and cause of death

#19

Post by ggm »

pbh101 wrote: post #14
ggm wrote: post #2

Hypothesised cranial haematoma after accident with tree, died aged 48. Reconstruction aligns with paintings, but it wasn't clear if the reconstruction model was informed by the paintings so somewhat meaningless they agree. Also the diagnosis isn't informed by the craniometry from what I can read: it's a reconstruction and an unconnected diagnosis from reports of his death. Amusingly a website which had (nc)register.c…

What’s amusing about two different sites being named ’Register’? It is a relatively common newspaper name suffix like ‘Times’ or ‘Post.’ Or is there something else I’m missing?

The one cited here most often would not be the national catholic register. I assumed it was thereg from a cursory look before clicking.

Re: Thomas Aquinas' skull reveals appearance and cause of death

#20

Post by dr_dshiv »

The first use of the word “android” comes from the discussion of a legendary mechanical talking head invented by Albertus Magnus. Thomas Aquinas couldn’t bear its babble and so he smashed it to bits. So, maybe he’s a patron saint of the anti-AI crowd?

https://archive.org/details/b30337161

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