The Majestic Indifference Of The Mountain
Behind all of this — behind the skull and the controversy and the reconstruction and the community presentation — stands Chimborazo itself.
Chimborazo is one of the great geographical facts of Ecuador. Its summit at 6,263 meters makes it the highest point in Ecuador and, as noted, the point on the Earth’s surface farthest from the planet’s center. The mountain has been dormant for approximately 1,400 years, though “dormant” is a relative term for a structure that last erupted in the early centuries of the current millennium.
For the people who have lived in its shadow for thousands of years — including the man whose skull was found in the ravine near Punín — Chimborazo has been a permanent feature of the world. Not unchanging, because mountains do change on geological timescales, and not truly permanent, because everything in the physical world is subject to change eventually. But permanent by any human measure: the mountain was there before the Punín-2 man was born, and it will be there long after his face is forgotten.
The specific meaning that the Chimborazo mountain held for the hunter-gatherer communities of three thousand years ago is not recoverable from the archaeological record. Mountains occupy significant places in the cosmologies of many Andean cultures — they are sacred beings in many Indigenous Andean traditions, associated with water, weather, and the ordering of the natural and human world. Whether the hunter-gatherer communities of the early first millennium BCE held beliefs about Chimborazo that prefigured these later traditions is impossible to know.
What can be said is that Chimborazo was visible to the Punín-2 man every day of his life. The mountain’s mass dominated the western horizon of the inter-Andean valley where the Chimborazo region sits. The glaciers on its summit — which have been retreating dramatically in recent decades due to climate change — were almost certainly larger three thousand years ago than they are now, providing the visual backdrop that would have been familiar to him from birth.
He did not know about the controversy that his skull would generate. He did not know about the farmer who would find that skull thousands of years after his death, or the researchers who would study it, or the anthropologist in Britain who would reconstruct his face, or the moment when his face would be shown to people in the Chimborazo region who might be his descendants.
He knew the mountain. He knew the páramo. He knew the people he lived among and the land he moved through.
And then, after approximately fifty years of that life, he died in the Chimborazo highlands, in the landscape that Chimborazo presides over, and was eventually covered by the earth of the ravine where his skull would wait for three thousand years.