British scientists reconstruct the face of a Neanderthal woman

A team of British archaeologists revealed this Thursday the reconstructed face of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman, work that questions what we knew about this species often considered crude and undeveloped.

A documentary available from this Thursday on the Netflix platform and produced by the BBC narrates from the discovery of a skull in Iraqi Kurdistan to this reconstruction.

It all started in 2018, when archaeologists from the University of Cambridge discovered the skull of a Neanderthal individual that they named Shanidar Z, after the cave where it was found, closed to scientists for 50 years for political reasons.

After observations, they concluded that it was a woman, around forty years old when she died.

The lower part of the skeleton had already been excavated in 1960, along with the remains of at least 10 Neanderthals, by American archaeologist Ralph Solecki, known for his work rehabilitating the image of this species.

The discovery of Shanidar Z’s skull, probably crushed by a falling rock after his death, was a real surprise for researchers.

The team “did not expect to find any more Neanderthals” in the cave, Professor Graeme Barker, from the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research in Cambridge, told AFP.

“We wanted to try to date the burials (…) so we could use the site [de Shanidar] to contribute to the broad debate about the reasons for the disappearance of Neanderthals”, who lived alongside Homo sapiens for thousands of years before becoming extinct around 40,000 years ago.

Shanidar Z was part of a group of five individuals found behind a huge vertical rock in the center of the cave, which may have served as an indicator for Neanderthals to bury their dead in the same location.

– 3D printing –

The fact that the remains were found in the same position and facing the same direction could mean that Neanderthals had a “tradition” around death and that there was “transmission of knowledge between generations”, explains Chris Hunt, professor at John Moores University, in Liverpool, who participated in the research.

This “intentional behavior (…) does not resemble what textbooks say about Neanderthals, which describe a brutal and short life,” he adds.

Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Cambridge, explains that extracting Shanidar Z’s remains was a very delicate operation.

The bones and surrounding sediment had to be reinforced ‘in situ’ with a glue-like product before being extracted into several small pieces wrapped in aluminum foil.

The more than 200 skull fragments were then assembled in a Cambridge laboratory into what appeared to be a “priceless 3D puzzle,” especially because they had a consistency “similar to a biscuit dipped in tea,” says Pomeroy.

After being reconstructed, the skull was printed in 3D, allowing two renowned paleoartists – Dutch twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis – to reconstruct his face by applying layers of recomposed skin and muscles, work shown in the documentary “The Secrets of the Neanderthals”.

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NETFLIX