A British team of archaeologists revealed the reconstructed face of a 75,000-year-old man on Thursday. Neanderthal woman, as researchers reassess the perception of the species as brutish and unsophisticated.
Called Shanidar Z Following the cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where her skull was found in 2018, the latest discovery has led experts to investigate the mystery of the 40-something Neanderthal woman resting in a sleeping position beneath a huge stone marker vertical.
The lower part of its skeleton is believed to have been excavated in 1960 during groundbreaking excavations by American archaeologist Ralph Solecki in which he found the remains of at least 10 Neanderthals.
“I think she can help us connect with who they were,” said Dr. Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist at the Cambridge University project.
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“It is extremely exciting and a great privilege to be able to work with the remains of any individual, but especially one as special as her.” she told the BBC.
Solecki’s discovery of a group of bodies, one of them surrounded by clumps of ancient pollen, led him to controversially argue that this was evidence of funerary rituals with the dead placed on a bed of flowers.
The political difficulties it entailed took around five decades for a team from Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores Universities to be allowed to return to the site in the Zagros Mountains in northern Iraq.
“The skull was as flat as a pizza”
The last Neanderthals mysteriously became extinct about 40,000 years ago, just a few thousand years after the arrival of humans.
Shanidar Z’s skull, believed to be the best-preserved Neanderthal find of this century, had been crushed to a thickness of 0.7 inches, possibly by a rockfall relatively soon after his death.
Professor Graeme Barker of the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research in Cambridge told the BBC that “the skull was basically as flat as a pizza.”
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“It’s an extraordinary journey to go from that to what we see now,” Barker said. “As an archaeologist, sometimes you can feel jaded by what you’re doing. But every once in a while you fall short of the fact that you’re touching the past. We just forget how extraordinary it is.”
Shanidar Z is the fifth body identified in the group buried over a period of at least several hundred years just behind the rock in the center of the cave.
Archaeologists believe the stone was used as an identifier to allow itinerant Neanderthals to return to the same location to bury their dead.
The latest research by John Moores team member Professor Chris Hunt now suggests that the pollen that gave rise to Solecki’s controversial theory “Flower Burial” Theory In fact, it could have come from bees burrowing in the cave floor.
But Hunt said there was still evidence – such as the remains of a partially paralyzed Neanderthal found by Solecki – that the the species were more empathetic than previously thought.
“There’s been a big reassessment that was actually initiated by Ralph Solecki in this cave with ‘Shanidar 1’ with his withered arm and his arthritis and his deafness, who should have been taken care of. That tells us there was compassion,” he said.
Placing the group’s bodies in the same place, in the same position and facing the same direction implies “tradition” and “transmission of knowledge between generations,” he said.
“Exciting” and “terrifying” discovery
“It seems much more like determined behavior that you wouldn’t associate with textbook stories about Neanderthals, which say their lives were nasty, brutal and short,” he added.
Pomeroy, the Cambridge paleoanthropologist who discovered Shanidar Z, said finding his skull and upper body had been “exciting” and “terrifying”.
The skeleton and surrounding sediment had to be reinforced in situ with a glue-like consolidant before being removed in dozens of small blocks wrapped in aluminum foil.
Senior conservator Lucía López-Polín then assembled the more than 200 skull fragments as the first step in facial reconstruction for the newly released Netflix documentary “Secrets of the Neanderthals.”
Pomeroy said the task had been like a “high-stakes 3D puzzle”, especially because the fragments were very soft “similar in consistency to a biscuit dipped in tea”.
The reconstructed skull was then 3D printed, allowing paleoartists and identical twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis in the Netherlands to complete the reconstruction with layers of muscle and skin fabricated for the documentary, which was produced by the Scientific Unit of BBCStudios.
Pomeroy said the skulls of Neanderthals looked very different from those of humans “with huge eyebrows and a lack of chins.”
But he said that the recreated face “suggests that these differences were not so strong in life,” highlighting the miscegenation between Neanderthals and humans “To the point that almost everyone alive today still has Neanderthal DNA.”
The BBC reported that researchers are sure that the Neanderthal is a woman. Since no pelvic bones were recovered, archaeologists relied on certain dominant proteins found in tooth enamel that are associated with female genetics. The slight stature of the skeleton also supports the interpretation.