Christopher Rynn’s own account of working with the Punín-2 skull captures this point precisely. “Punín-2 resembles an East Asian skull from the front, but not at all from the side,” he told Live Science. This observation — that the skull looks similar to East Asian skulls in one view but distinctly different in another — gets at exactly why morphological comparisons can be misleading. The feature that generated the initial controversy (a resemblance from the front view) was real but insufficient as evidence for the conclusions drawn from it. The fuller picture, considering the skull from multiple angles and in the context of the broader physical anthropology of the Americas, pointed in a completely different direction.
The Man Who Made The Face
Christopher Rynn is an independent forensic craniofacial anthropologist based in the United Kingdom. His connection to the University of Dundee — referenced in multiple reports on the Punín-2 reconstruction — situates him within one of the important centers of forensic facial reconstruction research in the world, a discipline that has been refined significantly over the past several decades.
The specific techniques Rynn uses are ones he describes as the “Manchester Method” — a set of approaches developed at the University of Manchester in the 1970s — though he notes that they have evolved into a combination of techniques from multiple traditions around the world. Forensic facial reconstruction has always been an interdisciplinary enterprise, drawing on anatomy, physical anthropology, forensic science, and artistic skill in combinations that vary between practitioners and evolve as the science develops.
Rynn’s work on the Punín-2 skull was initiated through his colleagues in Ecuador, specifically the team led by sculptor Hector Flores Franco from the University of Chimborazo. Flores Franco and his colleagues provided Rynn with access to the skull, and the reconstruction became an international collaboration: the physical expertise of the Ecuadorian team combined with Rynn’s specific expertise in forensic craniofacial reconstruction.
One aspect of Rynn’s approach to the Punín-2 project stands out in his own account of it: he deliberately minimized the amount of context he learned about the skull before beginning the reconstruction. This methodological choice — purposefully avoiding information about the skull’s cultural origin, geographic context, and the debates that had surrounded it — was designed to ensure that the face he produced would be based solely on what the skull’s shape could tell him, rather than on assumptions about what a person from this particular background should look like.
The choice reflects a specific concern about the risk of circular reasoning in forensic reconstruction: if the reconstructor knows that a skull is from population X, and has expectations about what people from population X look like, those expectations can unconsciously influence the reconstruction in ways that make it look more like population X than the skull’s actual shape warrants. By approaching the skull without those expectations, Rynn was trying to let the skull speak for itself.
The face that resulted from this approach was distinctly Indigenous American. Which is exactly what the skull was, once the old theories about Oceanic ancestry and Pleistocene age had been properly set aside.
Rynn has also worked on reconstructions outside the Americas — his reconstruction of a Neanderthal face from approximately 50,000 years ago is one of his more prominent other projects. The range of his work, across different populations and vastly different time depths, speaks to the breadth of forensic reconstruction as a practice: the principles of how bone structure relates to facial appearance are consistent enough across human populations and across human evolutionary history to allow the same basic approach to be applied to very different specimens.