This information — dark skin, dark eyes, dark hair — would be fed into all three reconstruction efforts.

But what those teams did with it, and how they interpreted the underlying skull data alongside it, would produce dramatically different faces.

The 2026 Study: A New Kind of Reconstruction Science

The study that would crystallize all of this into one of the most remarkable documents in the history of paleoanthropological reconstruction was published in May 2026 in npj Heritage Science, a Nature Portfolio journal focused on the science and technology of cultural heritage.

The paper’s full title: “From bone to face: How different reconstruction frameworks influence the appearance of the Early Upper Paleolithic woman.”