His face is the face of a person from the ancient Nile Valley: features that sit at the intersection of the North African and West Asian genetic backgrounds that his genome reveals.

This reconstruction is important not just as a visual artifact but as a humanizing element of the research.

The numbers and statistics of genomic analysis — the percentages of ancestral components, the haplogroup designations, the p-values of statistical tests — can distance the reader from the fact that the subject of this research was a real human being with a real face.

The reconstruction bridges that distance.