“It’s a portrait of their actual ancestor,” Rynn said. “They seem to like it.”
This is his story. And through him, it is the story of a controversy about who the first Americans were, how they got here, and what a face from three thousand years ago can tell us about the deep human past of an entire continent.
The Chimborazo Region And The World He Lived In
Before the face — before the skull, before the controversy, before any of the science that eventually produced the reconstruction — there was a man. A real person who lived in a real place and died there sometime between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago.
He lived in what is now the Chimborazo region of Ecuador’s central Andes. The region takes its name from the volcano that dominates it — Chimborazo, whose summit at 6,263 meters above sea level is the point on the Earth’s surface farthest from the planet’s center, owing to the equatorial bulge. The mountain is vast and cold and permanent-looking in the way that mountains always seem permanent to the people who live in their shadow, though the geological reality is that they are changing constantly.
Three thousand years ago, the people who lived in the Chimborazo region were hunter-gatherers. This is the characterization that archaeologists and anthropologists use for the populations of the late prehistoric period in this part of the Andes — people who lived by hunting animals and gathering plant foods rather than by the organized cultivation of crops that would later transform the economic and social structure of the region.
The transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural economies in the Andes was not instantaneous or uniform. It happened at different times in different places, driven by specific ecological conditions, population pressures, and cultural developments. In the Chimborazo highlands at the time of the Punín-2 man’s life, the archaeological evidence is consistent with a lifestyle that relied primarily on the resources of the páramo — the high-altitude grassland ecosystem that characterizes the Andean highlands above approximately 3,000 meters elevation.
The páramo is a specific and demanding ecological environment. Cold, with dramatic temperature swings between day and night, and with precipitation patterns that vary between wet and dry seasons, it requires specific knowledge and specific technologies to inhabit successfully. The people who lived in this environment three thousand years ago had that knowledge — accumulated over generations, transmitted through experience and teaching, embedded in the specific practices that made survival possible.