This reconstruction — a forensic artist’s interpretation based on the skull’s measurements — became one of the most contentious artifacts of the entire controversy when it was published.

The reconstructed face looked, to many observers, startlingly like the actor Patrick Stewart — or, in some versions of the description, like a modern Polynesian or Ainu individual.

It did not look like the stereotypical image of a Native American face.

For the tribes, this reconstruction was offensive and disturbing — a high-profile, media-ready image suggesting that their ancestor looked like someone other than their own people.

For scientists, it was a data-driven interpretation of skeletal evidence.

For the media, it was a gift: a face to put on the story.

The disconnect between how the scientific community and the tribal communities perceived this reconstruction illustrated, more clearly than almost anything else in the Kennewick case, the profound differences in how these groups understood identity, ancestry, and what it means to belong to a people.

Science, in the Western tradition, tends to understand ancestry in terms of genetic population groups and skeletal morphology — categories that can be measured and compared across space and time.

These categories are not fixed; populations mix and migrate, and the genetic and skeletal characteristics of any group change over time.

But the basic framework is biological.