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A woman in her early 40s was buried in a cave 75,000 years ago, laid to rest in a ravine dug to accommodate her body. Her left hand was curled under her head and a stone behind her head may have been placed as a cushion.
Known as Shanidar Z, named after the cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where she was found in 2018the woman was a Neanderthal, an ancient type of human that disappeared about 40,000 years ago.
Scientists studying his remains painstakingly assembled his skull from 200 bone fragments, a process that took nine months. They used the contours of the face and skull to guide a reconstruction to understand what it might look like.
The stunning recreation is featured in a new documentary “Secrets of the Neanderthals” produced by the BBC for Netflix, which will be available for streaming on Thursday.
With pronounced eyebrows and no chin, Neanderthal skulls look different from those of our own species, Homo sapiens, said Dr. Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist and associate professor in the department of archeology at the University of Cambridge, who unearthed the skeleton and it appears in the new film. Shanidar Z’s facial reconstruction suggests that these differences may not have been as striking in life, Pomeroy said.
“There is some artistic license there, but at the heart of it is the real skull and the real data about what we know about (these) people,” she said.
“She actually has a pretty big face for her size,” Pomeroy added. “She has really big eyebrows, which you wouldn’t normally see, but I think dressed in modern clothes you probably wouldn’t look twice.”
Neanderthals lived in Europe, the Middle East and the mountains of Central Asia for about 300,000 years, overlapping modern humans by about 30,000 years. Analysis of the DNA of modern-day humans has revealed that during this period, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens occasionally met and interbred.
New analysis
When Pomeroy first excavated the skeleton, its sex was not immediately obvious because only the upper half of the body was preserved. Telltale pelvic bones were missing. The team that initially studied the remains relied on a relatively new technique that involves sequencing proteins within tooth enamel to determine Shanidar Z’s sex, which is revealed for the first time in the documentary.
Researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Liverpool estimated the specimen’s height to be about 1.5 meters, comparing the length and diameter of the arm bones with data from modern humans. An analysis of the wear and tear on her teeth and bones suggested she was around 40 years old at the time of her death.
“It’s a reasonable estimate, but we can’t be 100 percent sure, actually, that they weren’t older,” Pomeroy said. “What we can say is that this is someone who lived a relatively long life. For that society, they would probably have been very important in terms of knowledge, in terms of life experience.”
The cave where Shanidar Z was buried is well-known among archaeologists because a Neanderthal tomb discovered there in 1960 led researchers to believe that Neanderthals may have buried their dead with flowers — the first challenge to the prevailing view that ancient humans were dumb and brutal. . Subsequent research by Pomeroy’s team, however, cast doubt on the flower burial theory.
Instead, they suspect that pollen discovered among the graves may have arrived via pollinating bees.
Still, over the years, scientists have found increasing evidence of Neanderthals’ intelligence, sophistication, and complexity, including artstring It is tools.
Neanderthals repeatedly returned to Shanidar Cave to bury their dead. The remains of 10 Neanderthals were unearthed at the site, half of which appear to have been deliberately buried in succession, the research found.
Neanderthals may not have honored their dead with bouquets of flowers, but the inhabitants of Shanidar Cave were likely an empathetic species, research suggests. For example, a Neanderthal man buried there He was deaf and had a paralyzed arm and a head injury that probably left him partially blind, but he lived a long time so he must have been cared for, according to research.
Shanidar Z is the first Neanderthal found in the cave in more than 50 years, Pomeroy said, but the site could yield more discoveries. While filming the documentary in 2022, Pomeroy discovered a left shoulder blade, some ribs, and a right hand belonging to another Neanderthal.
“I think our interpretation at the moment,” she said, “is that these are actually probably the remains of a single individual, which was then disturbed.”
Reconstructing the skull
Pomeroy described the reconstruction of Shanidar Z’s skull, which was crushed shortly after death, as a “high-stakes 3D puzzle.” The fossilized bones were hardened with a glue-like substance, removed into small blocks of cave sediment and wrapped in aluminum foil before researchers sent them to the University of Cambridge for analysis.
In the Cambridge laboratory, the researchers took microCT scans of each block and used the images to guide the extraction of bone fragments. Pomeroy’s colleague Dr. Lucía López-Polín, an archaeological conservator at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain, pieced together more than 200 pieces of skull by eye to return it to its original form.
The team scanned and 3D printed the reconstructed skull, which formed the basis of a reconstructed head created by Danish paleoartists Adrie and Alfons Kennis, twin brothers who constructed layers of fabricated muscle and skin to reveal Shanidar Z’s face.
Pomeroy said the reconstruction helped “bridge the gap between anatomy and 75,000 years of time.”
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