Owing to a series of new fossil finds, archaeological discoveries, advances in genetics, including studies of ancient DNA, and an increase of climatic data, our understanding of hominin evolution has changed drastically over the past couple of decades. The fairly neat picture of human evolution in the 1990s has turned into a far more complex story challenging a number of preconceived notions about species, dispersals, and lineages. All the new data has gradually worked towards replacing a linear evolutionary representation as a favoured theoretical model by a more bush-like understanding of human evolution. This has a critical impact on hominin reconstructions and how they are constructed as ancestors or relatives in scientific discourse as well as in public representations at museums, publications and documentaries. Their outlook change, how we see them and how they are mirrored in our own image change. Contemporary hominin reconstructions by palaeoartists reflect this. Crucial to this kind of reconstruction work are the bones that form the palaeoanthropological record of hominin evolution. Specialized knowledge from genetics, anatomy, and physiology about soft tissue, hair, skin colour, eyes, etc., sometimes constituting consensus and sometimes not, come from publications and communications with members of the scientific community. Fossil data is also published. But fossils are different. Extremely rare and often the topic of highly politicized claims of ownership and heritage restricting direct access for researchers and artists, bones are reconstructed in a number of different ways informing both science and art. Original casts are often as difficult to work on as the fossils themselves. Consequently, commercial casts made by companies play an unnoticed role in interpretations, even though they are themselves not necessarily based on neither originals nor original casts. Digital data is guarded with equal cautiousness as original fossil material, and only published with limited information. Palaeoanthropological data is thus constructed in a complex social and epistemic network of interest groups with different agendas. In this paper I will analyse the changes in hominin reconstruction in recent history, and discuss how the complex negotiations between scientific, commercial, and artistic visualizations generate what we think we know about the looks of human ancestors.