What the three faces share — dark skin, dark eyes, dark hair, the structural proportions of her particular skull — is where the evidence is strongest.

What they diverge on — the specific shape of the nose, the precise form of the lips, the particular character conveyed by the face as a whole — is where the evidence runs out and interpretation begins.

This is not a failure.

It is an honest account of what can and cannot be recovered from a 45,000-year-old skull.

The failure would be to present one of the three faces as definitive — to pretend that the reconstruction had transcended interpretation and directly accessed the ancient truth.

What Remains Unknown