The dark skin and hair were rendered with the tactile immediacy that silicone and individually set hair can achieve.

This was the most viscerally compelling of the three reconstructions — the one most likely to produce the feeling, in a viewer, of encountering an actual person from deep time.

But the individuating details that created that effect were necessarily the product of artistic judgment.

Another skilled practitioner might have made different choices and produced a different, equally compelling individual.

The AFA3D virtual reconstruction produced a face that reflected the statistical regularities of the French adult reference population translated onto an Upper Paleolithic skull.

The result was mathematically defensible and computationally reproducible.