There's been an awful lot of "Santa doesn't exist," this last week, and we're here to tell you "Yes, he does." For the skeptical, a reconstruction of Nicholas of Myra's 1,600 year old skull is pretty revealing. Thanks to the Image Foundry, who uses the data from the skull in order to do virtual clay reconstruction of faces, we can now see what St. Nick looks like:
According to their site, "this 3D visual was created using 2D data gathered by expert facial anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson from the University of Manchester. The reconstruction featured in “The Real Face of St Nicholas,” a one hour television documentary produced by Atlantic Productions for BBC2, and has also been shown on The Discovery Channel and Have I Got News for You, and was published in the Sunday Times."
The Catholic Encyclopedia says there is hardly any historical evidence for St. Nick, except for his presence as the Bishop of Myra in the fourth century.
So holy was Nicholas that after his death his relics were carefully preserved, and through the vagaries of history — basically a Muslim-Christian war a thousand years ago — the saint's skull and other bones were relocated (stolen or rescued, depending on your point of view) to Bari, a city on what would be the Achilles' tendon of the Italian boot.
In the 1950s, the bones were removed while the crypt was spruced up. While they were out, the Vatican asked an anatomy professor at the University of Bari to take thousands of minutely detailed measurements and x-rays of the relics. Flash forward to the present day, and another University of Bari expert, forensic pathologist Francesco Introna, decided to commission an expert facial anthropologist, Caroline Wilkinson of the University of Manchester in England, to reconstruct the saint's face and head using the new technology and the earlier measurements.
The wizards at Image Foundry in England then took the data, and presto!
Delighted? Disappointed? Arguments for the veracity of the face are strong. Every face has the same 26 muscles but each skull is different, and that underlying bone structure gives a unique form to each person's face. Which is what happened when Wilkinson began laying the virtual muscles onto the 1,600-year-old skull of Saint Nicholas of Myra.
So for all those naysayers ruining children's holidays, there WAS a St. Nicholas, he WAS real, and still is in the hearts of children all over the world. Merry Christmas, and happy holidays to all God Discussion readers!
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