One woman around 40 years old She was buried in a cave 75,000 years ago, laid to rest in a cavity carved to accommodate her body. Her left hand was curled under her head, and a stone behind her head may have been placed as a support.
Known as Shanidar Zin reference to the cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where she was found in 2018, the woman was a neanderthal, a type of ancient human being that disappeared about 40,000 years ago.
Scientists studying his remains carefully 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 and understand what it might have looked like.
The stunning recreation is featured in a new documentary “Secrets of the Neanderthals”produced by the BBC for Netflix, which hits streaming this Thursday (2).
Watch the trailer for the documentary “Secret of the Neanderthals”
With pronounced supraorbital ridges and no chins, Neanderthal skulls look different from those of our own species, Homo sapiens, said Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist and associate professor in the department of archeology at the University of Cambridge, who discovered the skeleton and 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’s a little bit of artistic license there, but at the core is the real skull and real data about what we know of these people,” she said.
“She actually has a pretty big face for her size,” Pomeroy added. “She has quite large supraorbital ridges, which we wouldn’t normally see, but I think dressed in modern clothes you probably wouldn’t look twice.”
Neanderthals lived throughout Europe, the Middle East and the Central Asian Mountains for about 300,000 years, overlapping with modern humans by about 30,000 years. Analysis of the DNA of modern-day humans has revealed that during this time, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens occasionally met and interbred..
New analysis
When Pomeroy first excavated the skeleton, the sex was not immediately obvious because only the upper half of the body was preserved. The telltale pelvic bones were missing. The team that initially studied the remains relied on a relatively new technique involving sequencing proteins within tooth enamel to determine Shanidar Z’s sex, which is revealed for the first time in the documentary.
These researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Liverpool estimated the height of the specimen to be around 1.5 meters by comparing the length and diameter of the arm bones with data on modern humans. An analysis of 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 completely sure, actually, that she wasn’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 quite important in terms of their knowledge, their life experience.”
The cave where Shanidar Z was buried is well-known among archaeologists because a Neanderthal tomb discovered 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 brutes. . Subsequent research by Pomeroy’s team, however, cast doubt on this 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 Neanderthal intelligence, sophistication and complexity, including art, ropes and 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 male Neanderthal buried there was deaf and had a paralyzed arm and head trauma that likely left him partially blind, but he lived a long time so he must have been cared for, according to the research.
Shanidar Z is the first Neanderthal found in the cave in more than 50 years, Pomeroy said, but the site could yet 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 relatively soon after death, as a “high-stakes, three-dimensional puzzle.” The fossilized bones were hardened with a glue-like substance, removed into small blocks of cave sediment and wrapped in aluminum foil before being sent to Cambridge University for analysis.
In the Cambridge laboratory, researchers took micro-CT scans of each block and used the images to guide the extraction of bone fragments. Pomeroy’s colleague Lucía López-Polín, an archaeological conservator at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleontology and Social Evolution in Spain, pieced together more than 200 pieces of skull by hand to return it to its original shape.
The team scanned and 3D printed the reconstructed skull, which served as the basis for a reconstructed head created by Danish paleoartists Adrie and Alfons Kennis, twin brothers who created layers of fabricated muscle and skin to reveal Shanidar Z’s face.
Pomeroy said the reconstruction helped “close that gap between anatomy and 75,000 years of time.”
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