Origins & Reconstructions - Origins - Faces from Deep Time

Thousands of years separate us from the people shown in this series. And yet that distance seems to fall away the moment their eyes meet ours. Photographed from Elisabeth Daynès's prehistoric reconstructions (Daynes's website), these portraits ask a simple, slightly unsettling question: how close are we, really, to the people who lived before history began?
Past the archaeological evidence and the scientific method behind each face, what I am after is presence: a gaze, a posture, the texture of skin, the hint of a personality.
What looks back is not an anonymous ancestor but an individual. Caught between fact and imagination, these faces remind us that prehistory was not populated by concepts or species, but by human beings whose fears, lives and hopes may not have been so different from ours.