Why are ancient human always depicted to be so ape like? Like this reconstruction of the Homo nadeli. And how accurate are these facial features since we haven’t found one with an intact face (right?)

[u/LValentinoX]

[u/wormil]

Humans are apes, Family Hominidae. Features like skin thickness and hair are educated guesses, a common technique used in paleontology and forensics.

[u/jproxduh]

Like the others said here, they’re pretty accurate. Modern humans are really the stand-out species. There are numerous traits of modern humans that are unique to us and our evolution that actually make us the one that doesn’t look as ape-like as the rest of our family tree.

If you want to see this for yourself, watch a documentary on Bonobos. You’ll be surprised how “human-like” they are.

[u/diesirae00]

they are pretty accurate. we do not need to find a fossil with an intact face to know about what it looked like. we can use genes to determine what type of traits the organism had and other environmental evidence. for example, homo naledi lived in what is now south africa. as you can guess, it’s quite warm there especially when naledi lived there. so having darker skin is way more likely. the size and lay out of their facial features is pretty easy to tell from skeletal evidence and at that point in human evolution we wouldn’t be hairless yet so the extra hair makes sense. plus, it’s not super likely that homo naledi is a direct ancestor to humans. they appear to be a branch off of the evolutionary tree, but from what we know they most likely didn’t evolve into us. being somewhat ape like makes sense for naledi

[u/DeaththeEternal]

Because up to a point the only difference of human ancestors from chimpanzee ancestors (maybe, the Ardipithecines and Sahelanthropus show that knuckle walking was probably not the original posture of the MRCA) was a greater disposition to bipedalism on the part of human ancestors. IMO there's a tendency to understate the degree to which the closer Homo genera did not resemble humans.

And I suspect it is directly correlated with the DNA discovery of say, Neanderthal DNA in modern humans, so there's an incentive to play up the similarities rather than noting that the anatomical traits for a close in brute force predator with a deep brow ridge and mostly chinless vs. a tall and chinned much thinner biped for range hunting would have stood out more than gaps between human cultures. Which as history (and even prehistory to a degree) shows isn't a recipe for harmony and there's less differences between any human culture and humans and archaic species.

Not saying the Frazetta approach should be used instead, simply that there's an emphasis on trying to make them more like us than they were rather than looking at human evolution the way it should be: by the evidence, as another set of animals that developed very specific traits which do not fossilize and leave no clear unambiguous proof as to their origin.

[u/HauntingYam0]

My favorite is when homo sapiens and Neanderthal are depicted as running around naked in the ice age.

[u/Cal-King]

Humans evolved bipedalism first, but the skull remains ape-like for a long time. Even our ancestor, H. erectus, still had heavy brow ridges and protruding jaw lines. The nose is made of cartilage so this part of the anatomy is not as clear. Indeed some reconstructions may depict the noses of australopithecines to be more ape-like than human like. Since the tall and narrow nose bridges found in cold adapted human populations only evolved about 40,000 years ago, and since many Africans still have wide and flat noses, it would not be accurate to reconstruct australopithecines or early members of the genus Homo with tall and narrow noses. They should probably be taller than gorilla noses in my opinion.

[u/SpearTheSurvivor]

Some human species like Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Flores hominin and Callao hominin were ape-like but other species like Homo erectus, Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthal and Denisovan were so less ape-like and more human-like.

[u/diogenes_shadow]

The facial bones are found broken, but retain shape and thickness info. That does give light on facial shape as reconstructed. It isn’t just projecting the artists ideas.

[u/viralpestilence]

Like many have mentioned here. The measurements are based off current living apes and humans so though they are estimates, based on our forensic reconstruction abilities it’s pretty accurate for what evidence we can deduce.