A 75,000-year-old Neanderthal skull found in the foothills of Iraq has been pieced back together by researchers, who believe it belonged to a woman in her mid-forties.
Now her face has been recreated for a new Netflix documentary called Secrets Of The Neanderthals.
The skull was unearthed at the Shanidar Cave site 500 miles north of Baghdad in 2018 by archaeologists from the University of Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores.
It had been flattened to around two thick after being crushed, possibly by rockfall, relatively soon after death and was then compacted further by tens of thousands of years of sediment.
To return it to its original shape, more than 200 pieces of the skull were pieced together by hand.
Researchers think the skeleton may be the top half of an individual excavated in 1960.
Since they had no pelvic bones, the team relied on sequencing tooth enamel proteins to determine the sex. They named the woman Shanidar Z.
Teeth were also used to place her in her mid-40s, through levels of wear and tear – with some front teeth worn down to the root. It is a significant age to reach in early
At around five feet tall, and with some of the smallest adult arm bones in the Neanderthal fossil record, her physique also implies a female.
The team used a glue-like consolidant to strengthen the bones and surrounding sediment then removed Shanidar Z in dozens of small foil-wrapped blocks from under seven-and-a-half metres of soil and rock within the heart of the cave.
In a Cambridge lab, researchers took micro-CT scans of each block before gradually diluting the glue and using the scans to guide extraction of bone fragments.
Dr Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, said: “Each skull fragment is gently cleaned while glue and consolidant are re-added to stabilise the bone, which can be very soft, similar in consistency to a biscuit dunked in tea.
“It’s like a high stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle.
“A single block can take over a fortnight to process.”
The rebuilt skull was surface scanned and 3D-printed, forming the basis of a reconstructed head created by world-leading paleo artists and identical twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis, who built up layers of fabricated muscle and skin to reveal a face.
The cave has also been home to remains of 10 other Neanderthal people excavated more than 60 years ago.
Shanidar Z was the fifth to be found in a cluster of bodies buried at a similar time in the same spot behind a vertical rock, more than two metres tall at the time, at the centre of the cave.
It had come down from the ceiling long before the bodies were interred and the researchers believe it may have served as a landmark for Neanderthals to identify a site for repeated burials.
“Neanderthals have had a bad press ever since the first ones were found over 150 years ago,” said Prof Graeme Barker, from Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, who leads the excavations at the cave.
“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.”
The other four bodies in the cluster were found in 1960 by archaeologist Ralph Solecki. The work then was among the first to suggest Neanderthals were more sophisticated than the primitive creatures many had assumed, based on their stocky frames and ape-like brows.
Clumps of ancient pollen surrounding one of the skeletons. Solecki and pollen specialist Arlette Leroi-Gourhan argued that was evidence of funerary rituals, where the deceased was laid to rest on a bed of flowers.
Buta study led by Professor Chris Hunt, of Liverpool John Moores University, now indicates the pollen was left by bees burrowing into the cave floor.
Further research since Shanidar Z was found has detected microscopic traces of charred food in the nearby soil.
These carbonised bits of wild seeds, nuts and grasses suggest not only that Neanderthals prepared food – soaking and pounding pulses – and then cooked it, but did so in the presence of their dead.
“The body of Shanidar Z was within arm’s reach of living individuals cooking with fire and eating,” said Dr Pomeroy.
“For these Neanderthals, there does not appear to be that clear separation between life and death.
“We can see that Neanderthals are coming back to one particular spot to bury their dead.
“This could be decades or even thousands of years apart.
“Is it just a coincidence, or is it intentional, and if so what brings them back?
“As an older female, Shanidar Z would have been a repository of knowledge for her group, and here we are 75,000 years later, learning from her still.”
Neanderthals are believed to have died out about 40,000 years ago and discoveries of new remains are now rare.
The Neanderthal featured in the Netflix documentary is the first from the cave for more than 50 years, and perhaps the best preserved individual to be found this century.
And while filming onsite for the documentary in 2022, the team found remains of yet another individual in the same burial cluster, uncovering the left shoulder blade, some ribs and a fairly complete right hand.
“Shanidar Cave was used first by Neanderthals and then by our own species, so it provides an ideal laboratory to tackle one of the biggest questions of human evolution,” said Prof Barker.
“Why did Neanderthals disappear from the stage around the same time as Homo sapiens spread over regions where Neanderthals had lived successfully for almost half a million years?”
