The deeper significance of the Zlatý kůň study is what it reveals about facial reconstruction as a scientific and communicative practice — and about how that practice is understood, and misunderstood, by the public.

When a museum displays a facial reconstruction of an ancient human, most visitors interpret it as a scientific determination of what that individual actually looked like.

The reconstruction serves a communicative function: it makes the ancient person accessible, relatable, humanly real in a way that a skull cannot be for most people.

The face is presented — usually as a photograph, sometimes as a physical sculpture — and it is understood as evidence, as the recovered appearance of someone specific who lived long ago.

This understanding is not entirely wrong.