A team of researchers carried out a detailed reconstruction of the face of a Neanderthal womanallowing us to see the appearance of this anticipated one of ours when he lived around 75 thousand years ago.
For this purpose, scientists used the shattered remains of a skull collected in the Shanidar cave, in Iraq.
When they were found, the bones were in such a precarious state that researchers first had to strengthen them before beginning cranial reconstruction.
The “puzzle” took a year to finish and only then did the expert paleoartists who created a realistic 3D model.
The depiction appears in a new BBC Studios documentary for Netflix called “The Secrets of the Neanderthals,” which examines what we know about our evolutionary cousins that went extinct some 40,000 years ago.
Teeth were decisive in determining sex and age
The skull on which the model is based was located in the Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. It is a emblematic site of archeology, where the remains of at least 10 Neanderthal men, women and children were unearthed in the 1950s.
When a British group was invited by local authorities in 2015, they came across a new skeleton – nicknamed Shanidar Z – made up of the individual’s upper body, which included the spine, shoulders, arms and hands.
The skull was also largely intact, but compressed into a layer 2 centimeters thick, probably due to a rock that fell from the cave ceiling at some point in the past.
“The skull was basically flat like a pizza”Cambridge professor Graeme Barker, who is leading the new excavations in Iraq, told the BBC.
The condition of Shanidar Z’s remains did not allow obvious answers to some questions. First of all, Neanderthal sex.
The pelvic bones would have been an aid in ascertaining the truth, but they were not recovered from the upper part of the body.
Therefore, researchers relied on certain dominant proteins found in the enamel of teeth that are associated with female genetics. The small stature of the skeleton also supports this interpretation.
Another question concerns the age at which Shanidar Z died. Cambridge scientists came to the conclusion that the end would have come around the age of 40, which is also indicated by teeth worn down almost to the root. The Neanderthal woman would be reaching the natural end of her life.
For a long time, scientists considered Neanderthals brutal and unsophisticated compared to our species.
But this view was transformed precisely by the discoveries made at Shanidar.
The cave is famous for displaying what appears to be some type of funerary practice, which indicates a level of civilizational sophistication not previously attributed to Neanderthals.
