The reconstruction built from these findings is a scientific-artistic interpretation, not a recovered portrait. It represents one plausible face, built from genetic predictions, skull geometry, and soft-tissue estimation methods. It is the best-informed representation of Cheddar Man’s likely appearance that science can currently produce. It is not a photograph.
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## The Kennis Brothers and the Art of Reconstruction
The facial reconstruction unveiled alongside the DNA findings in February 2018 was the work of Adrie and Alfons Kennis, Dutch paleoartists with an international reputation for their reconstructions of prehistoric individuals. The Kennis brothers have worked on reconstructions of Neanderthals, Ice Age humans, and other ancient individuals for museums and research institutions across the world.
The process of reconstructing a face from ancient skeletal remains is a specialized intersection of science and art. It begins with the skull, which provides the bony architecture underlying the face. Techniques borrowed from forensic facial reconstruction — developed originally to help identify modern skeletal remains in crime investigations — are applied to model how soft tissue would overlie the bony features. Known relationships between skull geometry and overlying tissue depth, established from studies of modern individuals, provide a framework for building out the three-dimensional form of the face from the bone structure.
For the 2018 Cheddar Man project, this process began with a high-resolution 3D scan of the skull, performed using an Artec Space Spider scanner by a specialist scanning company. The scanner captured the skull’s surface geometry at an accuracy of up to 0.05 millimeters. The resulting digital model was used to produce a precise 3D-printed replica of the skull — a 1:1 scale print that could be handled and worked with without any risk to the original specimen.