Mikhail Mikhaylovich Gerasimov

Mikhail Mikhaylovich Gerasimov (Russian: Михаи́л Миха́йлович Гера́симов) (2 September 1907 – 21 July 1970) was a renowned Soviet archaeologist and anthropologist who developed the first technique of forensic sculpture based on findings of anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, and forensic science. He studied the skulls and meticulously reconstructed the faces of more than 200 people, including Yaroslav the Wise, Ivan the Terrible, Friedrich Schiller and, most famously, Timur (Tamerlane).

Gerasimov was born 1907 in St. Petersburg shortly before his doctor father was posted to settlement near Irkutsk. As a child he studied the bones of prehistoric animals that were unearthed during the construction of the area.

Gerasimov produced his first reconstructions of prehistoric Neanderthal and Java Man, in 1927 (Gerasimov, p. 5); they are exhibited in the Irkutsk museum. Gerasimov learned to take a skull of early hominids and, by dint of elaborate measurements and anatomical research, to form a face that people would recognize, sometimes including the most common expression. As he wrote in his autobiography, The Face Finder (1968), he was fascinated with an opportunity to "gaze on the faces of those long dead." It took a decade of studies and experiments to come close to individual portrait resolution quality of historical persons (1938, Gerasimov, p. 7), however his first public work of this type is dated 1930 - face of Maria Dostoyevskaya, mother of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

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