Science: American Face

Tepexpan Man, probably the oldest known American, had acquired a face last week. In the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, Vienna-born Sculptor Leo Steppat made the face out of statistics and Plasticine.

Steppat’s friend, Anthropologist Hell-mut De Terra, dug up Tepexpan Man last February near Mexico City. When Steppat saw the skull he decided to combine sculpture and science to give it an authentic face. He first considered dissecting corpses and measuring the average thickness of tissue on modern human faces. But he found that the University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. Wilton M. Krogman had done the job already, establishing the average thickness of face flesh at 15 points.

Steppat took a plaster cast of the famous skull and laid down cork to the exact thickness called for at all 15 points. Then he connected the points with Plasticine. The result: an average face of Tepexpan Man. Said Steppat: “If the finished reconstruction doesn’t look like the Tepexpan Man, it looks like his first cousin.”

The hairdo had to be imaginary. The style adopted, with strands stiffened with clay, was copied from later Mexican Indians. To make his reconstructed man look younger, Steppat gave him a full set of teeth (the original skull lacked uppers).