Team determines gender of science center’s mummy

University of Louisville (Kevin Hyde)

A University of Louisville research team recently helped the Louisville Science Center learn more about an old friend — a 2,600-year-old friend.

Actually, the friend, a mummy called Then-Hotep, is more like a family member, having been one of the most popular attractions at the science center and its forerunner, the Natural History Museum, since the early part of the last century. But throughout all of those years, it kept one big secret: Nobody knew its gender.

Until now. Under the leadership of professor Aly Farag, director of the Computer Vision and Imaging Process lab at J.B. Speed School of Engineering, the UofL team applied technological and forensic expertise to verify that Then-Hotep is a female.

The human skull holds many clues to gender, so the team focused on making a faithful reproduction of the mummy’s head, Farag said.

Here’s how the team did it.