Most reconstruction studies present a single result.

The methodology is described, the face is shown, and the implicit message is: this is what the individual looked like.

Doubts about methodology, disagreements about interpretation, choices made by the artist or scientist that could have gone differently — these are typically addressed in supplementary materials if at all, and they rarely reach general audiences.

Velemínská and her colleagues did something different.

They put three methods in direct competition, applied to the same skull and the same genomic data, documented the results side by side, and then asked the critical question: when different legitimate methods produce different faces, what does that tell us about what we are actually doing when we reconstruct ancient faces?