She gazes out with piercing blue eyes. Her face, neither pale nor dark, sits framed by long, dark hair. If you passed her in the street today, she might not seem out of place. But this woman died more than 10,000 years ago.
Now, thanks to ancient DNA and a sculptor’s art, we can meet her again.
The “Margaux woman,” as she’s tentatively called, lived in what is now Belgium some 10,500 years ago. She belonged to a mobile tribe of hunter-gatherers who roamed the valleys along the Meuse River, thousands of years before the rise of farming, cities, or metal tools. Her remains were discovered in 1988 in the Margaux cave near Dinant. For decades, she lay in storage. Today, her likeness stands in a museum courtyard—reborn from bone, genome, and sculpting clay.
“She also had a nose with a high nasal bridge… strong brow ridges despite being a female,” Isabelle De Groote, an archaeologist at Ghent University who led the reconstruction project, told CNN. Her team worked with Dutch artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis, known for their hyper-realistic reconstructions of ancient humans.
A Surprising Skin Tone
The Margaux woman belonged to the same genetic population as Cheddar Man, Britain’s famous Mesolithic skeleton. But her appearance, while similar in some respects, also diverged in a subtle but telling way.
“We know that she had blue eyes and an average skin colour,” De Groote told The Times. “That’s striking; until now, most finds from that time indicated a darker skin.”
Cheddar Man is thought to have had very dark skin, with blue eyes and curly hair. The Margaux woman, by contrast, had a medium skin tone—lighter than expected, but not quite pale. “The skin pigmentation of the Margaux woman points to greater complexity… and that it was more heterogeneous than previously thought,” De Groote told Live Science.
The finding suggests that the genetic evolution of skin tone of early Europeans was not a simple linear march from dark to light. Rather, it was a patchwork of variations shaped by diet, migration, and climate.
“All individuals so far analyzed on ancient DNA in Western Europe have belonged to the same genetic group,” said archaeologist Philippe Crombé, also from Ghent University. “So it’s a bit of a surprise, but… it is to be expected that in the wide area of Western Europe there’s some variability, as there is today.”
Rituals, Memory, and a Matriarchal Mystery
But Margaux’s face is only part of the story. Her burial adds a haunting layer of cultural mystery.
She was not alone.
Her remains were found alongside those of at least eight other women—perhaps as many as 60—in a cave used as a burial ground for hundreds of years. A rather unusual find, as Mesolithic burial sites also include men and children. But here, only women were buried.
Many of the skeletons had been covered with ochre, a red pigment often used in ancient rituals. Some skulls were scalped, others bore post-mortem cut marks. One body had been carefully covered with stones. Archaeologists suggest it was a memorial site.
“These findings point to complex burial customs and raise intriguing questions about the social structure and cultural practices of this early hunter-gatherer community,” De Groote said.
Did these women hold special roles? Were they leaders, shamans, mothers? The evidence hints at symbolic behavior, but leaves much unsaid. De Groote offers one possibility: “The society of women seems to have had religious rituals.”
Life in the Meuse Valley was shaped by movement. “They’re still moving around because they are entirely dependent on natural resources: wild game, wild plants, fish,” said Crombé. Campsites show traces of hazel forests, stone tools, and animal bones. But while the people moved, their dead stayed behind. The caves became fixed points in a fluid world.
A Face, a Name, a Legacy
The Margaux woman was between 35 and 60 years old when she died. By Mesolithic standards, that was a long life. Scientists are now using DNA to explore whether those buried together were related. The woman’s jewelry and tattoos, which were reconstructed based on finds elsewhere in the Meuse basin, suggest she lived in a society rich in symbolism and meaning.
And now, after millennia in the dark, her face has returned to the light. The public has been invited to name her. The options—Margo, Freya, and Mos’anne—draw from the local cave, the nearby hills, and the river valley.
It’s a fitting gesture for someone who lived before history, yet somehow still belongs to it.
