But the track record suggests that preserving the specimen carefully, maintaining its integrity, and making it available to future researchers — while also ensuring its study is subject to appropriate ethical frameworks — is the right approach.

The value of the archive continues to compound.

The Geometry of Uncertainty

The geometric morphometric analysis in the 2026 study can be understood as producing a map of uncertainty — a representation, in mathematical space, of where the three reconstructions agree and where they diverge, and by extension, where the evidence constrains the face more or less strongly.

This map has a structure.

The regions of the face where the three reconstructions cluster closely together in shape space — where the geometric distances between the corresponding features of the three faces are small — are the regions most robustly determined by the skull morphology and genetic data.