In a groundbreaking revelation, a team of British archaeologists has unveiled the reconstructed face of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman, challenging long-held perceptions of the species as brutish and unsophisticated. The woman, named Shanidar Z, was discovered in a cave in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2018, and her face was meticulously pieced together in a project that has taken six years to complete.
Shanidar Z's skull, believed to be the best-preserved Neanderthal find of this century, was found flattened to a thickness of 0.7 inches, possibly due to a rockfall shortly after her death. The skull was reconstructed from over 200 fragments, a task likened to a "high stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle" by Dr. Emma Pomeroy, a paleo-anthropologist at the University of Cambridge. The fragments were so delicate that they were compared to "a biscuit dunked in tea" in terms of their consistency.
The reconstructed skull was then 3D-printed, allowing paleo-artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis to complete the facial reconstruction with layers of fabricated muscle and skin. The result is a face that challenges our preconceived notions of Neanderthals. "Neanderthal skulls have huge brow ridges and lack chins, with a projecting midface that results in more prominent noses. But the recreated face suggests those differences were not so stark in life," Pomeroy said.
The discovery of Shanidar Z and her subsequent facial reconstruction have also sparked a reappraisal of Neanderthal culture and behavior. The cave where she was found is believed to have been a burial site, with bodies laid to rest in a sleeping position beneath a large vertical stone marker. This has led experts to suggest that Neanderthals may have had a more sophisticated understanding of death than previously thought.
Professor Chris Hunt of John Moores University, a member of the research team, suggested that the positioning of the bodies in the same spot, in the same position, and facing in the same direction implied a "tradition" and the "passing of knowledge between generations." This, he said, "looks much more like purposeful behavior that you wouldn't associate with the textbook stories about Neanderthals."
As Professor Graeme Barker of Cambridge's McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research put it, "Our discoveries show that the Shanidar Neanderthals may have been thinking about death and its aftermath in ways not so very different from their closest evolutionary cousins — ourselves."
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