The 2018 Kennis reconstruction, built from the DNA predictions of dark skin, blue or blue-green eyes, and dark curly hair, looked substantially different. It depicted a face that many viewers found striking and unexpected — not because there was anything unusual about the combination of traits on any biological level, but because the combination did not match the preconceptions that had shaped both the 1998 reconstruction and decades of popular imagination about ancient Europeans.
Alfons Kennis, speaking about the reconstruction project, noted that people almost invariably assume their ancestors would have resembled them. The 2018 Cheddar Man reconstruction was a direct challenge to that intuition, and its challenge was grounded in data that the 1998 reconstruction lacked.
What makes the comparison particularly useful for science communication is that both reconstructions were produced by serious researchers using the best methods available to them at the time. The 1998 reconstruction was not propaganda or motivated distortion — it was simply working without genetic information that did not yet exist and that would have been essentially impossible to generate with the sequencing technologies of the late 1990s. The improvement between 1998 and 2018 is an illustration of what ancient genomics added to the picture — not a correction of deliberate error but of unknowing assumption.
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## Contamination Controls and the Challenge of Ancient DNA Work
One of the most frequently asked questions about the Cheddar Man genomics — one that appeared in some of the public skepticism following the 2018 announcement — concerned whether the DNA recovered from the specimen was genuinely ancient or might have been contaminated with modern DNA.