He’s physically imposing, somewhere in his 50s, with a wiry gray beard disappearing into his wild boar cloak. His broad chest is dabbed with chalk, and his pale blue eyes are narrowed, as if he’s spotting something in the distance. Dubbed “Ludvig,“ he lived in northern Europe some 8,000 years ago.

Too bad Ludvig can’t talk, though, because researchers have many questions for him.

This is the first facial reconstruction from human remains excavated about a decade ago in south-central Sweden at Kanaljorden, a curious archaeological site where, sometime around 6,000 B.C., animal and human bones had been deliberately arranged on a submerged stone platform in the center of a small lake. Kanaljorden made international headlines in 2018 when researchers published