British researchers reconstruct the face of a Neanderthal woman

A team of archaeologists The British unveiled on 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 very underdeveloped.

A documentary broadcast since Thursday on the Netflix platform and produced by the BBC narrates his journey, 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 specimen that they named Shanidar Z, in honor of the cave where they found it and which had been closed to scientists for 50 years for political reasons.

The observations allow us to conclude that it was a woman, about forty years old at the time of her death.

The lower part of the skeleton had already been excavated in 1960, along with the remains of at least ten Neanderthals, by the 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 stone shortly after his death, came as a real surprise to researchers.

The team “I didn’t expect to find 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 (…) in order to be able to use the site [de Shanidar] to contribute to the broad debate on the reasons for the disappearance of the Neanderthals”, which coexisted with Homo sapiens for a few thousand years before becoming extinct about 40,000 years ago.

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

3d print

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

This “intentional behavior (…) is not like what textbooks say about Neanderthals, which describe a brutal and short life“, Add.

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

The bones and surrounding sediments had to be reinforced in situ with a glue-like consolidant before they could be extracted into numerous small pieces wrapped in aluminum foil.

The more than 200 skull fragments were later assembled in a Cambridge laboratory, in what looked like a “very valuable puzzle in 3D”especially because the fragments had a consistency “similar to a cookie dipped in tea”says Pomeroy.

Once reconstructed, the skull was 3D printed, allowing two renowned paleoartists – Dutch twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis – to reconstruct its face by applying layers of recomposed skin and muscles, a work shown in the documentary broadcast on Thursday and titled “Secrets of the Neanderthals.”

Although the skulls of Neanderthals were very different from those of humans, “with enormous brow ridges and practically no chin”the recreated face “suggests that these differences were not so pronounced,” Pomeroy says.

This, in his opinion, allows us to see “how interbreeding occurred, given that almost all people alive today still have Neanderthal DNA.”

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