The skull itself, through all of this, has sat in museum storage — occasionally retrieved for study, occasionally scanned, occasionally measured, never speaking for itself but bearing witness, in its calcium phosphate silence, to everything that has been said about it.

Science and Storytelling

There is a tension in how paleoanthropological research is communicated to the public that the Zlatý kůň story brings into particularly clear focus: the tension between accuracy and narrative.

Scientific papers are accurate — or aim to be — and they communicate uncertainty through statistical language, confidence intervals, alternative hypotheses, and explicit discussions of methodological limitations.

But they are not, for the most part, compelling narratives.

Most people do not read them and would not find them engaging if they did.