Understanding what the skull actually showed — and why it was so misleading without the genetic evidence to contextualize it — is essential to understanding the larger significance of the DNA findings.

The study of ancient human skull shape for the purpose of inferring ancestry is a field with a long and complicated history.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, skull measurement — craniometry — was one of the primary tools that physical anthropologists used to classify human populations.

The field was deeply entangled with the scientific racism of its era, and many of its conclusions served to justify the racial hierarchies that its practitioners took for granted.

Modern craniometrics has largely shed these historical associations, and legitimate research on how skull shape varies among populations and how that variation evolved over time continues to be conducted with far more rigorous methods than its predecessors employed.