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A 40-something woman was buried in a cave 75,000 years ago, laid to rest in a gutter that had been hollowed out to accommodate her body. Her left arm was folded under her head, and a rock may have been placed behind her head as a cushion.
Called Shanidar Z, after the cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where she was found in 2018, the woman was a Neanderthal, an ancient human type that disappeared about 40,000 years ago.
Scientists studying her remains have carefully assembled her skull from 200 bone fragments, a process that took nine months. They used the contours of the face and skull to guide the reconstruction to understand what she looked like.
The hit hobby is featured in a new BBC-produced documentary “Secrets of the Neanderthals” for Netflix, which is available to stream Thursday.
With pronounced brow ridges and no chins, the skulls of Neanderthals look different from those of our own species, Homo sapiens, said Dr Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist and associate professor at Cambridge University’s department of archeology who discovered the skeleton. and which can be seen in the new film. Shanidar Z’s facial reconstruction suggests that these differences may not have been so stark in life, Pomeroy said.
“There’s some artistic license, but at the heart of it is the real skull and the real details of what we know about these people,” she said.
“She has a pretty big face for her size,” Pomeroy added. “She’s got pretty big brow ridges, which we wouldn’t normally see, but I think, when you’re dressed in modern clothes, you probably wouldn’t look twice.”
Neanderthals lived across Europe, the Middle East and the Mountains of Central Asia for about 300,000 years, overlapping with modern humans for 30,000 years or so. Analysis of DNA from modern humans shows that, during this time, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens encountered each other from time to time and interbred.
New analysis
When Pomeroy first excavated the skeleton, its gender was not immediately clear because only the upper half of the body was preserved. There were no telltale pelvic bones. The team that first studied the remains relied on a relatively new technique of sequencing proteins inside tooth enamel to determine Shanidar Z’s sex, which is revealed for the first time in the documentary.
Those researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Liverpool estimated that the height of the specimen was about 5 feet (1.5 meters) by comparing the length and diameter of its hand bones with data on modern humans. Analysis of wear and tear on teeth and bones indicated that she was in her mid-40s at the time of her death.
“It’s a reasonable estimate, but we can’t be 100% sure, in fact, that they weren’t older,” Pomeroy said. “We can say that this is someone who has had a relatively long life. For that society, they would probably be extremely important in terms of their knowledge, their life experience.”
The cave where Shanidar Z was buried is best known among archaeologists because of a Neanderthal grave discovered in 1960 that led researchers to believe that Neanderthals may have buried their dead with flowers – the first challenge to the prevailing belief that the dumb and brutish ancients. . Subsequent research by Pomeroy’s team, however, cast doubt on that flower burial theory.
Instead, they suspect that the pollen found among the graves may have come from pollinating bees.
Still, over the years scientists have found increasing evidence of Neanderthals’ intelligence, sophistication and complexity, including art, weaving and tools.
The Neanderthals returned several times to the Shanidar Cave to appease the dead. The remains of 10 Neanderthals have been found at the site, half of which appear to have been deliberately buried one after the other, research has found.
The Neanderthals may not have honored their dead with bouquets of flowers, but the inhabitants of Shanidar Cave were probably a caring species, according to research. For example, there was one Neanderthal male who was deaf and had paralyzing arm and head trauma that left him partially blind, but he lived for a long time, so he must have been taken care of, according to research.
Shanidar Z is the first Neanderthal found in the cave in more than 50 years, Pomeroy said, but the site could still yield more discoveries. During the filming of the documentary in 2022, Pomeroy was found with a left shoulder blade, some rib bones and a right hand belonging to another Neanderthal.
“I think our interpretation at the moment,” she said, “is that these are probably the remains of an individual, which has been disturbed there.”
Reconstruction of the skull
Pomeroy described the reconstruction of Shanidar Z’s skull, which was crushed soon after death as a “high-stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle”. The fossilized bones were hardened with a glue-like substance, removed into small blocks of cave sediment and wrapped in foil before the researchers sent them to the University of Cambridge for analysis.
In the Cambridge laboratory, researchers performed micro-CT scans of each block and used the scans to guide the extraction of bone fragments. Pomeroy’s colleague, Dr. Lucía López-Polín, an archaeological conservator from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain, assembled over 200 skull bits to restore it to its original form.
The team scanned and 3D printed the reconstructed skull, which was the basis of a reconstructed skull created by Danish paleo artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis, twin brothers who created layers of muscle and skin made to reveal Shanidar Z’s face.
Pomeroy said the reconstruction “helped bridge that gap between anatomy and 75,000 years of time.”
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