Researchers recreate the face of a Neanderthal woman from 75 thousand years ago; see | Archeology

A team of archaeologists and conservators led by the University of Cambridge in England reconstructed the face of a woman neanderthal 75 thousand years ago, whose skull it was reassembled from hundreds of bone fragments.

The discovery was released by the university this Wednesday (1). The pieces of the skull neanderthal were found in 2018 in the Shanidar Cave, in Iraqi Kurdistan, where your species (Homo neanderthalensis) repeatedly returned to bury his dead. The site was made famous by excavations in the late 1950s that discovered several Neanderthals, probably buried in succession.

“The skulls of Neanderthals and humans are very different,” says Emma Pomeroy, paleoanthropologist at the Department of Archeology at Cambridge, in a statement. As she explains, the braincases of H. neanderthalensis “they have huge eyebrow arches and a lack of chin, with a projected medium face that results in more prominent noses.”

Despite this, the recreated face (see below) suggests that these differences were not so striking in the life of the Neanderthal woman, who is called Shanidar Z. “Perhaps it is easier to see how interbreeding between our species occurred, to the point that almost all people alive today still have DNA from Neanderthal,” notes Pomeroy.

After the Neanderthal had already died, Shanidar Z had his head crushed, possibly by falling rocks. It was preserved for tens of thousands of years, until its flattened skull was found to be only about two centimeters thick.

Archaeologists believe that Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago, so finding new remains is rare. It is also possible that the woman reconstructed by the team is the best preserved individual found this century.

Reconstruction in the laboratory

The Cambridge laboratory’s chief conservator, Lucía López-Polín, pieced together more than 200 pieces of skull freehand to return it to its original shape, including the upper and lower jaw.

“Each skull fragment is gently cleaned while glue and consolidant are re-added to stabilize the bone, which can be very soft, similar in consistency to a biscuit dipped in tea,” describes Pomeroy.

The team also used forensic studies to understand, among other things, how the Neanderthal woman’s teeth had become dislodged from her jaws. The reassembled skull was 3D scanned and used as a base to create a reconstructed head by paleoartists and identical twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis, who added layers of fabricated muscle and skin to reveal a face.

Analysis indicates that Shanidar Z was an older woman, around 40 years old — a significant age for deep prehistoric times. The wear of the teeth revealed her age group and the proteins in the tooth enamel indicated the sex of the deceased. “As an older female, Shanidar Z would have been a repository of knowledge for her group, and here we are seventy-five thousand years later, still learning from her,” notes Pomeroy.

For Graeme Barker, professor at the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research in Cambridge, who is leading excavations at the cave, the findings show that Shanidar Neanderthals may have thought about death and its consequences in ways not very different from us humans. modern.

The discovery appears in the Netflix documentary “The Secrets of the Neanderthals”, which premieres globally today (2) on the streaming platform. During filming of the film in 2022, the team found remains of another Neanderthal in the same burial site, including the left shoulder blade, some ribs and a very complete right hand. In addition, three other Neanderthals dating back to around 50,000 were found in sediments located higher up.