Face of 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman unveiled by UK researchers

The Neanderthal woman, Shanidar Z, was found in 2018 in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Shanidar Cave, where her skull was discovered.

• Vivek Mishra
• 02 May, 2024

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By: Vivek Mishra

A team of archaeologists from the UK has unveiled the reconstructed face of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman named Shanidar Z. The discovery challenges previous perceptions of Neanderthals as primitive and uncultured.

“We wanted to try and date these burials… to use the site to contribute to the big debate about why the Neanderthals died out, and then we started finding these bits,” said Professor Graeme Barker from Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, who led the recent excavations at Shanidar cave. “We had never expected to get more Neanderthals.”

Shanidar Z was found in 2018 in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Shanidar Cave, where her skull was discovered. The cave had been excavated in 1960, revealing the remains of several Neanderthals.

“There’s been this huge reappraisal which was actually started by Ralph Solecki in this cave with ‘Shanidar 1’… That tells us there was compassion,” said Professor Chris Hunt of John Moores University, referring to the care of a partially paralysed Neanderthal found by Solecki.

Professor Chris Hunt suggests that pollen found around the remains, previously interpreted as evidence of flower burials, may have come from bees.

However, evidence like the care of a partially paralyzed Neanderthal suggests empathy within the species.

“It looks much more like purposeful behaviour that you wouldn’t associate with the textbook stories about Neanderthals which is that their lives were nasty, brutish, and short,” Hunt added.

Emma Pomeroy, a Cambridge palaeo-anthropologist involved in the discovery of Shanidar Z, described the excavation process as both exciting and challenging. “It was like a high stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle,” she said.

The delicate skull and surrounding sediment had to be carefully strengthened and removed. “The fragments were very soft… similar in consistency to a biscuit dunked in tea,” she added.

The reconstructed skull was 3D-printed and then completed with muscle and skin layers by palaeoartists for a Netflix documentary.

“Neanderthal skulls looked very different to those of humans… with huge brow ridges and lack of chins,” said Pomeroy.

“But the recreated face suggests those differences were not so stark in life,” she added, highlighting the interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans “to the extent that almost everyone alive today still has Neanderthal DNA.”

(AFP)