Scientists advised artist Keith Kasnot that the Kennewick man had a skull similar to the Ainu of Japan. That's not much to go on when the final appearance of a reconstruction depends so much on skin color, subtle facial features, and hair. This image is of a National Geographic magazine spread from an article on the first Americans.

Glaring out from the cover of the October issue of National Geographic you will see a female Neandertal. I love reconstructions like that because they help bring the past to life. But they make some people, particularly scientists, squirm. Why? Because they are primarily art. The reason is there are so many gaps in our knowledge that artists have to make guesses in order to complete the image. I know this because I have been involved in many of these reconstructions in my career, including the Iceman, the Kennewick man, the “hobbit” from Flores, and King Tut. In each case I was intimately aware of what we knew and what we didn’t know. In the end this makes one feel somewhat vulnerable to criticism, but I always felt we did the best we could, under the circumstances.

Here are some of the problems we encountered. In the case of the Ice Man, we didn’t have access to a three-dimensional cast of the skull. This was a severe limitation. Artist John Gurche had to reconstruct the skull from CT scans and photos before he could make his model. For the Kennewick man, who Keith Kasnot reconstructed digitally, we had a 3d scan of the skull, but some facial features, skin color, and hair amount and color were all quite speculative and based solely on the advice we were given that the closest match to the Kennewick man’s skeletal features were the Ainu people of northern Japan. For the hobbit we had a nice 3d model generated from a scan of the skull, but again, skin color, hair type, etc… were all quite speculative. The wild dark countenance of the final model looked frightening to some. Would a lighter-skinned, better groomed version have been easier to look at?  In the case of King Tut, we had a good skull to work from, based on a scan provided to us by Dr. Zahi Hawass of Egypt’s Supreme Council on Antiquities. But in this case, skin color and other facial features, such as nose and lip size, were not only unknown, but were highly political issues. I remember picking out eye color from a selection of glass eyes (of course we had no idea what color Tut's eyes were). I also remember asking the artist to make Tut's skin color darker in order to reach some intuitive midway point between "white" and "black," only to be defeated by the camera lights, which made Tut look light-skinned again.

So how did we do with our Neandertal? The Herculean effort by the paleoartist team, the Kennis brothers, was able to capture a lot of information. The body itself, based on known Neandertal bones, reflects some new information about the female Neandertal pelvis, which is especially interesting in light of new reports about the large brained Neandertal babies that had to pass through the birth canal. The model's beat up appearance and "hunting" pose is consistent with the notion that Neandertal life was rough, injuries were high, and we have no reason to believe that females did not participate in hunts one way or the other. But the real fun begins with the pigmentation of her skin and the color of her hair. Studies of the DNA from Neandertal bones found in Spain and Italy show they had a pigmentation gene, MC1R. It suggests Neandertals could have had red hair and freckles.

These reconstructions are tremendously time consuming and expensive. Is it worth it to try to bring the past to life, even if it our efforts will never be perfect?

Did paleoanthropolgist Lee Berger speak too soon about his discovery of human remains in Palau? He claimed their extremely small body size suggested island dwarfism. This skull, which he did not make any claims about, is too covered with calcite to say much. Critics say this skull, and others Berger studied, were probably children. Photo by author.

Were some of the earliest inhabitants of Palau dwarfed, as suggested by NGS grantee Lee Berger’s PloS One paper? Not according to a new report from Scott Fitzpatrick and colleagues whose critique of Berger’s work in PloS One can only be described as scathing. The thrust of Fitzpatrick's paper is that about the only thing that Berger and his colleagues got right was the name of the caves in which they found bones.

Fitzpatrick and his colleagues claims that the early people of Palau are well studied and fit within the spectrum of what is already known about early peoples of Pacific islands after decades of study. Fitzpatrick personally studied remains from a beach site in Palau called Chelechol ra Orrak. Among the remains were complete skeletons. Based on Berger's measurements, Fitzpatrick says the bones Berger found may have been small, but no smaller than those from Chelechol ra Orrak or other contemporaneous Pacific island populations.  Fitzpatrick argues it is known that small bones such as these appeared on people of normal size in Palau.

Berger suggests Fitzpatrick misinterpreted his findings (see NG News). I worked with Berger behind the scenes as he was studying the specimens and know that he would be the first to say that his report was based on a collection of fragmentary remains and would have to be considered a preliminary report. Thousands of bones, a lifetime of work for an archaeological team, remain in the caves awaiting study. He knew that much more work would be needed before anything more could be said about the bones from the caves. He explained how he felt that publishing a preliminary report was more responsible than withholding information.

In the closing section of Fitzpatrick’s paper he and his colleagues admit that they used a “sledgehammer to crack a nut,” meaning they deliberately pounded Berger. The negative tone of the paper, and statements like “some may see the Berger et al. paper as being so egregious that few will take it seriously,” will almost certainly influence Palauan officials who decide who is permitted to work in their islands and who is not.

This makes me wonder. Was such a heavy-handed treatment by Fitzpatrick necessary? Should Berger and his colleagues have kept their finds to themselves, even though they felt they were relevant to the ongoing debate about the hobbit from Flores?

What do you think?