Facial reconstruction of Ecuador's Punin-2 skull confirms Native American ancestry, with DNA testing planned to verify lineage

The archaic reading of the Punin skulls was always an argument about dates. It rested on a sediment layer older than Homo sapiens ^[5]. When a farmer found Punin-2 in the 1970s ^[2], researchers suggested it might be as old as the mastodon and giant sloth fossils in the same ravine ^[12]. Geology later showed that erosion and soil movement had mixed the younger human bones in with the ice age fossils ^[13], and that premise was gone. Punin-2 is now placed at 3,000 to 4,000 years ago ^[14], at least 7,700 years after the Pleistocene ended ^[1]. He died at about 50, according to recent osteological studies ^[15].

A facial reconstruction inherits what the skull contains and adds the reconstructor's choices. Rynn tried to keep his assumptions out by learning as little as possible about where the skull came from, so the face would rest on its shape alone ^[16]. Two features came from outside the bone. The hairstyle was not preserved, so he took local guidance on a style specific to particular tribal groups in Chimborazo ^[17]. "The hairstyle is very specific," Rynn said. "If it's wrong, it looks like a different tribe." ^[18]

The eyes are the more interesting case. Rynn's early versions made them too protrusive, as they would be in a skull of East Asian origin. On local advice he set them deeper, and the result is a face that looks distinctly Indigenous American ^[19]. "It explains a lot to me about the broader nature of skull and face shape differences between Native Americans and East Asians," he said ^[20]. For the ancestry question, the portrait is circular: the feature that most separates it from an East Asian face was set partly on local advice.

The ancestry evidence that stands apart from the portrait is the skull's shape, read by a specialist. Rynn is a forensic craniofacial anthropologist at the University of Dundee ^[7]. He said there is no question Punin-2 was an Indigenous American, descended from an ancestral group of North Siberians and East Asians during the last ice age ^[7]. "Punín-2 resembles an East Asian skull from the front, but not at all from the side," he told Live Science ^[8]. That judgement agrees with the date. Live Science's account does not describe how the "purely Native American ancestry" it reports was measured ^[6].

The 1925 Oceanic proposal was built on Punin-1, found in 1923 on an American Museum of Natural History expedition and judged archaic largely for its prominent brow ^[3][4]. That skull is still in New York ^[9]. The team, led by the sculptor Hector Flores Franco of the University of Chimborazo, is raising money to reconstruct it and to attempt ancient DNA analysis of both skulls ^[10]. "DNA will tell us the true genetic lineage," Rynn said ^[11]. I think he has the order of evidence right. Geology has settled the age, and of the evidence now available, only genetics can support a word as strong as "purely".