Watch: The Evolution of the Human Face Over Six Million Years

A new video shows how the human face has evolved over six million years, compressing the full history of human evolution into 68 seconds.

The author of the video, John Gurche, describes himself as a "paleoartist" and has made his name producing realistic reconstructions of long-dead creatures based on fossil evidence. The new video comes as precursor to his latest book titled Shaping Humanity: How Science, Art, and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins.

Gurche, who studied Anthropology and Paleontology at the University of Kansas is currently the artist in residence at the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, New York. He unveiled a bust of the recently discovered Homo naledi in September.

Gurche explained his work in a recent profile in National Geographic. For this project, Gurche traveled to the cave in South Africa where scientists discovered Homo naledi, the oldest ancestors to modern homo sapiens.

He spent weeks measuring, photographing, drawing and making casts of the skulls, before heading back to his New York studio, where he spent four-and-a-half months building up muscle and facial features using clay.

"I had such wonder and awe for this phenomenon of humans evolving, and I couldn't really find a place for that in the scientific work," he told the magazine, adding that he instead found it in art.

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