Warriors of Ancient Ba Tribe
Li Hongwei (Legal Medical Expert of Chongqing Forensic Science &Technology Research Institute):
There is no problem in deciding this person鈥檚 gender. As I said, this man was rather masculine. Comparing these tendon attachment points and these areas here with attachment points on other skulls, this persons' bone has more pronounced features. The mandible is thick, and its extroversion is very obvious. This person has very distinctive male features. And his zygomatic bone is rather big.
28/24/10
Reconstruction expert Wang Binwen started to reconstruct the skull. First he drew a picture according to the features and proportions of the skull. The drawing of the skull is a very important reference in the process of reconstruction. The size of a person's eyes, and the thickness of the eyebrows have a subtle relationship with the structure of the skull. He inserted small sticks in particular areas of the skull to mark the thickness of the muscles. He then moulded each individual muscle.
Wang Binwen has been involved in reconstruction work for over 20 years. He has succeeded in reconstructing the images of many ancient peoples. His reconstructed skulls of murder victims have helped police solve a number of criminal cases. What answer will Wang Binwen give us to the Ba mystery?
29/20/00
One week later, we saw the face that existed thousands of years ago. This was a common mongoloid face. We can find similar faces now in real life. Naturally we were eager to find out what kind of life the Ba people lived. It was a mode of living very close to ours today. Was there anything else in their life except slaughter, fights and death? How did they express their feelings? How did they treat their women and children?
It is true that their deaths and lives were very remote from us, but the spirits that haunt the bronze weapons seem tantalizingly close. Bronze is the color of time. It is 鈥渢ime鈥 that hinders us from knowing the real stories of the dead thousands of years ago. He might be the warrior that made swords. All we know is that the sword accompanied him througout his life.
30/31
2,000 years later, archeologists found him under the earth, amid numerous dead buried with the willow-leaf-shaped bronze sword of the Ba style. Archaeologists called the weapon 鈥渜i鈥, which was cast with puzzling inscriptions. It had the pattern of a man wearing pheasant plumes as a head ornament and scales all over his body, holding a double-head fish and a big lizard in his hands and standing on the sun and the moon. Was he dancing or praying?
