In The End, A Man
Strip away the controversy. Strip away the geology and the dating debates and the Oceanic ancestry hypothesis and the Pleistocene claim and the century of scientific disagreement. Strip away the forensic reconstruction technique and the tissue depth libraries and the digital software and the wax. Strip away even the face itself, for a moment.
What remains is a man.
A man who was about fifty years old when he died. A man who had lived his entire life in the Chimborazo highlands of Ecuador, in the high-altitude world of the páramo, among a community of hunter-gatherers who knew that landscape with the intimacy that comes only from complete dependence on it. A man who was the descendant, through perhaps a thousand generations, of the people who had crossed Beringia from northeastern Asia during the last Ice Age and had spent the intervening millennia becoming Andean.
He hunted. He gathered. He knew which plants were edible and which were medicinal. He knew where game could be found in different seasons. He knew the weather patterns that the mountain and the altitude created. He knew the people he lived among — their names, their histories, their relationships, their places in the community — with the intimate knowledge that small groups develop over years of close proximity.
He died at approximately fifty in the Chimborazo highlands, in the landscape that the great volcano overlooks, in a world that had no writing, no cities, no recorded history of the kind that later civilizations would produce.
His skull went into the ravine.
Three thousand years later, his face came back.
It is a specific face — not a generic ancient Andean, but this particular man, with the specific bone structure that his particular skull contains, with the hairstyle that the people of his region wore, with the eyes that the local consultation helped calibrate to the right depth.
His descendants saw it and recognized it.
“It’s a portrait of their actual ancestor. They seem to like it!”
That is enough. That is, in the end, what all of this science and history and controversy and reconstruction was for.
A man who lived. A skull that survived. A face that came back.
And the people of Chimborazo, looking at the face of someone from their own past, finally able to see who he was.
He was one of them.
He was here.