Not like we could prove them wrong

It was a penny whistle, surely?

Where do to you get that assumption?

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I believe the more information you have the more accurate you can probably get. I realize my response could read as a skeptical one. I just find this stuff very interesting and my personal thoughts on this are kind of a side tangent so I didn't include them in that post. I did in another response in this thread though if you are interested.

In the case of Chelsea there was no skull because well, she's still alive.

I want to see what Nathan Fielder's guy would come up with.

I think the more information you have the more accurate you can get. In the case of Chelsea there only was DNA available. Personally I find this stuff to just be very interesting. While some people are skeptical I just find this to be an intersection of art and science. In the Probably Chelsea exhibit they explain that the ones picked to show the media were of the higher percentages. However since Chelsea was open to it there was more they could depict based of her DNA. It's a pretty powerful exhibit to see because some of the possibilities look nothing like Chelsea. A person with that face would be identified as a completely different race as Chelsea. To me it empathized how much the concept of race is really a social response to the expression of a person's DNA. The idea that we could look like basically anybody else is really powerful.

It's a side tangent but if you are In San Francisco I recommend checking out the Exploratorium. It's a really fun and thought provoking science museum.

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What happened to the Omani holdings in Persia ?

That's interesting. I had never given too much thought about how hoaxes over the centuries could become thought of as "real history".

Well... my dude here ended up with four wives, because two died, one cheated on him and had a baby with their lawyer, and the last one was only married to him for a year or two before he was shot and assassinated, sooooo...

Yes, I agree that would be a good system. Museums lend things to each other all the time and they get money in exchange. Wouldn't it be better if that money went to the artifacts' country of origin?

I think we should offer to repatriate everything, and if those countries can't afford to preserve those items and would like help, there should be a trust set up by the museum where they're being displayed and a percentage of ticket sales should go into that trust. Then the trust could be used to cover the cost of building a facility/museum in the artifacts' home country so they can be safely returned.

It breaks my heart that people are being deprived of the experience of seeing important pieces of their own cultural history. That should be the priority, in my opinion.

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I feel like the artists do a great job of making the abstract concept of "your skull has a lot to do with how you look"; but they want to make everyone prettier. I agree with the other comments that want to see this done with the skull of a known and well documented person. Let's see how accurate this really is.

Someone has definitely tried it. Like wouldn’t that be the first or second thing you would test? And since we haven’t seen that, we can conclude that it is not accurate and this has basically artwork.

Let me know when your report on everything in the BM is ready.

Flex on him by saying his name before Heracles was Alcides.

The Parthenon Marbles were taken from Athens illegally. Lord Elgin obtained a "firman" (document) from the Sultan in Constantinople that gave him permission to take plaster casts of the friezes.

He went to Athens, showed the local authorities and insisted that it meant he could take the entire thing. He then proceeded to use untrained local labour to crowbar the friezes off the Parthenon.

He loaded them onto two boats, bound for London. One of the boats sank off the coast of Italy.

London was originally not interested and so he kept them in his "back yard" at his stately home in Scotland. Eventually, the British Museum agreed to buy them (fence). In the 1930s they found that everything was badly damaged from being left outside in Scottish weather. So they used untrained labour to clean them.

They then found this "strange pink tint" and used untrained labour once more to get the tint off using scouring pads and caustic soda!

It turns out the pink tint was remnants from the original paint from 2000 years earlier.

This story blows the theory that the BM "protected" (and continues to "protect") Greece's heritage clean out of the water. One can only imagine what they have done with the treasures from other civilisations.

This is just some dumb reasoning. If an American went to Finland and made a statue of Santa Claus there, complete with a name plate referring to it as such, at least 99% of Finnish people would still refer to it as Joulupukki (the Finnish word for Santa Claus), because that's their name for the character and has been for longer than America has existed as a country in its current state. You will pretty much never change people's use of a word like that when they've already been using their own word for them for centuries. If the creation was an original, sure, they would probably respect the foreign name enough to at least try and pronounce it, but they're not going to stop using a name they've been using forever for the newer, foreign version. Especially so in the case of Herakles which is originally a Greek creation in the first place.

In pre-Roman and early-Roman years, they called themselves Hellenes ("Greeks" is a complicated name, never used by Gre...Hellenes themselves, even today).

Later they called themselves Rhomaioi, which essentially meant "We're actually Hellenes, but the church calls us pagans, so we're Rhomaioi *wink*"

The term "Hellenes" was revived in the 15th century in an attempt to rouse rebellion against Ottoman occupiers and to re-assert Orthodox Christianity.

Small nitpick but that is a statue of Heracles then, not Hercules.

The lingua franca of the East Roman Empire was Greek, throughout its history with Latin only used for administrative purposes. It would have been Herakles, son of Dias.

This would've been 200 years before dioclecian so lowercase eastern. The aristocracy of the area would likely have spoke Latin and both languages would've been present.

A Greek living under Roman occupation might very well have identified as a Roman. They would've been a "Greek Roman" and held both things as significant labels of identity.

In the same way Peurto Ricans are also Americans. One identity does not drive out the other nor does one necessarily come first for many people.

I don't think they do sculptures off of the DNA when they make these renderings. I'm pretty sure I watched a doc one time and it explained that they actually re build the muscular features based off the skeleton and then add skin and other features on top. Not sure about that Chelsea exhibit but for the ones they did during the doc that's how it was done and it seems like a better method than trying to reconstruct based off of DNA alone.