What The American Museum Of Natural History Holds
The American Museum of Natural History in New York City holds the Punín-1 skull — the companion to the Punín-2 skull that was found in 1923 and that generated the original controversy about Oceanic ancestry.
The AMNH is one of the world’s great natural history museums, with collections spanning paleontology, anthropology, and biology accumulated over more than 150 years of expeditions, donations, and acquisitions. Its anthropological collections include human skeletal material from archaeological contexts on every inhabited continent, much of it acquired during the era of museum expeditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Punín-1 skull has been at the AMNH for over a century. It was examined there by Arthur Keith in 1925, when he proposed the Oceanic ancestry hypothesis that would be disputed for decades. It has been available to researchers who have studied it as part of the broader investigation of the Punín controversy.
The planned reconstruction of the Punín-1 skull — as part of the research program that the current team is fundraising for — would require access to the skull in its New York location, or access to high-quality three-dimensional scans of it sufficient to support reconstruction without physical access. Modern 3D scanning technology has made remote reconstruction feasible in ways that were not possible in earlier decades: if the AMNH has produced high-resolution photogrammetric or CT scans of the skull, those could potentially be used for a reconstruction without the skull itself traveling to the UK where Rynn is based.
The logistics of this collaboration — and the institutional permissions that any research use of AMNH collections requires — are part of the organizational work that the research program needs to address. Access to museum collections for research purposes is governed by specific policies at each institution, and the AMNH’s policies, like those of major museums generally, balance openness to legitimate research with responsible stewardship of unique and irreplaceable specimens.
The comparison that a Punín-1 reconstruction would allow — seeing the faces of both individuals from the same ravine, produced by the same reconstructor using the same methods — would itself be scientifically and publicly interesting. Whether the two individuals from the same location and approximately the same geological context looked similar or different, what the range of individual variation in their skull morphologies was, and what the comparison of their reconstructed faces says about the population from which they came — these are questions that the Punín-1 reconstruction would help address.