So between 2004 and 2008, Wikipedia editors were stuck in a tug of war between these two imperfect representations. Wikipedia’s open-edit policy led to some awkward user interfaces, as editors swapped and added pictures. Sometimes the Pioneer plaque again prevailed; at others, both images appeared together on the page.

Editors kept bringing up the basic anatomical problems with the Pioneer image. The woman in the picture lacked external genitalia. The drawing was not in color. It didn’t show children or older adults. More photos were put up for consideration, including a tastefully nude family with one child and one pregnant woman. Some Wikipedians thought they could bypass the controversy altogether by just putting a picture of a hand or cartoon faces. The arguments grew so heated that an editor consulted Wales himself, who wrote, “Having reviewed the issue only briefly, I have nothing helpful to add to the content discussion, which appears to be proceeding nicely and in accordance with best practices.”

Wales is the only source for this story who grew more impatient with the benefit of hindsight. When asked about the top image debate for this story, he wrote, "I'm not sure why this is interesting or in any way controversial. They are humans. You want to have a variety of pictures, and the article does. One of them has to be the first one on the page, and this one is. So what?"

Years had passed, but the editors remained stubbornly committed to their question. And after several years and many pages worth of arguments, they finally came to a consensus.

In 2007, a user who goes by Silence found a photo on the "Couples" page of Wikipedia and added it to the suggestions. It was a photo of a man and a woman from the Akha community in Thailand. A German photographer called Manuel Jobi, with the username Weltenbummler84, took the photo and added it to German Wikipedia in December 2006. In 2007, Jobi added it to the Wikimedia commons.

Silence, who (appropriately) did not comment for this story, writes in an FAQ that he picked this picture in particular because it was near the top of the page for alphabetical reasons—“Akha” starts with the letter “A.” No one changed it back, perhaps because they did not want to refute each of the exhaustive arguments penned by Silence and other editors. And so the power of arbitrary selection allowed the group to finally reach a consensus after years of debate. “In that long discussion, I think it’s quite easy to get wedded to your point of view,” says the editor Cedders. “And in the end, we just selected a random image.”

Just as the image on the plaque would tell aliens a lot about humans as a whole—we stand upright and have fingers—this image tells the rest of the world a lot about the Akha, a community of about 700,000 people who live in the areas surrounding the Mekong River. Micah Morton, an anthropologist who has lived with and writes about Akha traditions, was able to confirm that the couple in the photograph were Akha based on the woman’s shoulder bag. He says the sheath at her side holds a machete that the pair probably used to cut down the banana tree stalk that the man is carrying over his shoulder. They presumably returned home, cut the leaf into tiny pieces, and added it to pig feed.

For many generations the Akha grew rice, which each member of the community is supposed to offer up to their ancestors 12 times a year. But now many Akha grow more lucrative crops like coffee, tea, and rubber. Most young people attend compulsory national public schools, and have moved to towns and cities. Perhaps the combination of tradition and flux means that this picture meets the “represents humans over a long period of time” requirement, making them especially appropriate candidates to grace the top of the Wikipedia page dedicated to humans.