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A woman in her forties was buried in a cave 75,000 years ago and laid to rest in a trench hollowed out to house her body. Her left hand was curled under her head and a stone may have been placed behind her head as a pillow.
Known as Shanidar Z, after the cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where she was found in 2018, the woman was a Neanderthal, a type of ancient human who disappeared about 40,000 years ago.
Scientists studying her remains painstakingly assembled her skull from 200 bone fragments, a process that took nine months. They used the contours of the face and skull as a guide for a reconstruction to understand what she might have looked like.
The striking recreation is featured in a new documentary “Secrets of the Neanderthals,” produced by BBC for Netflix, available for streaming Thursday.
With pronounced brow ridges and no chin, the skulls of Neanderthals look different from those of our own species, Homo sapiens, said Dr. Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Archeology at the University of Cambridge, who excavated the skeleton and appears in the new film. Shanidar Z’s facial reconstruction suggests that these differences may not have been so great in life, Pomeroy said.
“There’s some artistic license there, but at the heart of it is the real skull and real data about what we know about (these) people,” she said.
“She actually has a pretty big face for her size,” Pomeroy added. “She has quite large brow ridges, which we wouldn’t normally see, but I think, dressed in modern clothes, you probably wouldn’t look twice.”
Neanderthals lived in the mountains of Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia for about 300,000 years, overlapping with modern humans for about 30,000 years. Analysis of DNA from modern-day humans has revealed that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens occasionally encountered and interbred during this time.
New analysis
When Pomeroy first excavated the skeleton, the gender was not immediately clear, as only the upper half of the body was preserved. It was missing telltale pelvic bones. The team that initially studied the remains used a relatively new technique that involves sequencing proteins in tooth enamel to determine Shanidar Z’s gender, which is revealed for the first time in the documentary.
Those researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Liverpool estimated the specimen’s height at around 1.5 meters by comparing the length and diameter of her arm bones with data on modern humans. An analysis of the wear and tear of teeth and bones showed that she was in her mid-40s at the time of her death.
“It’s a reasonable estimate, but we actually can’t be 100% sure that they weren’t older,” Pomeroy said. “What we can say is that this is someone who has lived a relatively long life. For that society they would probably have been very important in terms of their knowledge, their life experience.”
The cave where Shanidar Z was buried is known to archaeologists because a Neanderthal grave discovered there in 1960 led researchers to believe that Neanderthals may have buried their dead with flowers – the first challenge to the prevailing view that ancient humans were stupid and brutal goods. . However, later research by Pomeroy’s team has cast doubt on the flower burial theory.
Instead, they suspect that the pollen discovered among the graves may have arrived via pollinating bees.
Yet over the years, scientists have found more and more evidence of Neanderthals’ intelligence, sophistication and complexity, including art, rope and tools.
Neanderthals repeatedly returned to Shanidar Cave to lay their dead to rest. Research has revealed that the remains of ten Neanderthals were unearthed at the site, half of which appear to have been deliberately buried one after the other.
Neanderthals may not have honored their dead with bouquets of flowers, but the residents of Shanidar Cave were likely an empathetic species, research suggests. For example, a male Neanderthal buried there was deaf and suffered paralytic arm and head trauma that likely left him partially blind. Still, he lived a long time, so according to research he must have been cared for.
Shanidar Z is the first Neanderthal found in the cave in more than 50 years, Pomeroy said, but the site could yield more discoveries. While filming the documentary in 2022, Pomeroy discovered a left shoulder blade, some ribs and a right hand from another Neanderthal.
“I think our interpretation at this point,” she said, “is that these are probably the remains of a single individual, which was subsequently disturbed.”
Reconstruction of the skull
Pomeroy described the reconstruction of Shanidar Z’s skull, which had been crushed relatively shortly after death, as a “high-stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle.” The fossilized bones were hardened with a glue-like substance, removed in small blocks of cave sediment and wrapped in foil before researchers sent them to the University of Cambridge for analysis.
In the laboratory in Cambridge, researchers took 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 at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain, has pieced together more than 200 pieces of the skull by eye to return it to its original form.
The team scanned and 3D printed the rebuilt skull, which formed the basis of a reconstructed head created by Danish paleoartists Adrie and Alfons Kennis, twin brothers who built up layers of fabricated muscle and skin to reveal Shanidar Z’s face.
Pomeroy said the reconstruction helped “bridge the gap between anatomy and 75,000 years of time.”
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