The Ethics of Reconstruction

When Gurche built the facial reconstruction of Shanidar Z, he was doing something that has become a standard part of paleoanthropological and forensic practice: creating an image of a face from skeletal material.

But the ethics of that process deserve attention.

A facial reconstruction is an interpretation.

The underlying skull morphology constrains certain features — the general shape of the face, the size of the eye sockets, the width of the nose.

But many features — skin tone, eye color, hair texture, expression — are either inferred from genetic data (where available) or are educated guesses based on what is known about Neanderthal biology and variation.