Punín-1: The Skull In New York
The companion skull — Punín-1, the older of the two Punín finds — has its own story, and understanding it adds context to the significance of the Punín-2 reconstruction.
Punín-1 was found in 1923 during the American Museum of Natural History expedition. It was brought back to New York, where it entered the museum’s collections. It is currently held at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, where it has been for more than a century.
The AMNH is one of the world’s great natural history museums, with collections spanning geology, paleontology, anthropology, and biology. Its anthropological collections include human skeletal material from archaeological contexts around the world, acquired during the era of museum expeditions that characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Punín-1 skull, as the specimen that generated the original 1925 Oceanic ancestry hypothesis, occupies a specific place in the history of South American anthropological debate. It was the skull that Keith examined, the skull whose brow ridges prompted the comparison to Pacific Island populations, the skull that set the agenda for a controversy that lasted for most of the twentieth century.
The current plan, as part of the ongoing research program that produced the Punín-2 facial reconstruction, is to also reconstruct the Punín-1 skull — subject to access and funding. The Punín-1 skull’s location at the AMNH in New York creates a logistical complexity that the reconstruction team will need to navigate: accessing a specimen held in a major museum collection for research purposes requires institutional permissions and collaboration that are different from the circumstances of the Punín-2 work, which was done in collaboration with the University of Chimborazo team that has custody of that skull.
The attempt at ancient DNA analysis of both skulls, also part of the research plan, is subject to the same considerations about preservation quality that apply to the Punín-2 skull. Additionally, the Punín-1 skull has been in museum storage for over a century, and the specific conditions of that storage may affect the preservation of any residual DNA.
Both aspects of the planned follow-up work — the Punín-1 reconstruction and the DNA analysis of both skulls — represent the continuation of a research program that began with the 2026 Punín-2 reconstruction. They are also ways of addressing the remaining uncertainties: the visual comparison of Punín-1 and Punín-2 reconstructions would allow researchers to see directly how similar or different the two individuals appeared, and the DNA analysis would provide the genetic confirmation that the morphological and reconstruction evidence currently suggests but cannot definitively establish.