A team of British archaeologists revealed the reconstructed face of a 75,000-year-old man on Thursday. Neanderthal woman, as researchers reassess the perception of the species as brutal and unsophisticated.
Named Shanidar Z after the cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where her skull was found in 2018, the latest discovery has led experts to investigate the mystery of the 40-something Neanderthal woman who was laid to rest in a sleeping position under a huge vertical stone marker.
The lower part of his skeleton is believed to have been excavated in 1960 during groundbreaking excavations by American archaeologist Ralph Solecki in which he found the remains of at least 10 Neanderthals.
“I think it can help us connect with who they were,” said Dr Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist on the project at the University of Cambridge.
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“It is extremely exciting and a huge privilege to be able to work with the remains of any individual, but especially one as special as hers,” he told BBC News.
Solecki's discovery of a group of bodies surrounded by clumps of ancient pollen led him to argue controversially that this was evidence of funerary rituals with the dead placed in a bed of flowers.
Political difficulties meant it took around five decades for a team from Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores Universities to be able to return to the site in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq.
“The skull was as flat as a pizza”
The last Neanderthals mysteriously became extinct around 40,000 years ago, just a few thousand years after humans arrived.
Shanidar Z's skull, believed to be the best-preserved Neanderthal find of this century, had been flattened to a thickness of 0.7 inches, possibly by a rockfall relatively soon after his death.
Professor Graeme Barker of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge told the BBC that “the skull was as flat as a pizza, basically”.
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“It's a remarkable journey to go from that to what you see now,” Barker said. “As an archaeologist, you can sometimes be outraged by what you're doing. But every now and then you find yourself shortchanged by the fact that you're touching the past. We forget what an extraordinary thing it is.”
Shanidar Z is the fifth body to be identified in the cluster buried over a period of at least several hundred years just behind the rock in the center of the cave.
Archaeologists believe the stone was used as an identifier to allow wandering Neanderthals to return to the same spot to bury their dead.
The latest research by John Moores' team member Professor Chris Hunt now suggests that the pollen that gave rise to Solecki's controversial 'flower burial' theory could, in fact, have come from of bees dug into the floor of the cave.
But Hunt said there was still evidence, such as the remains of a partially paralyzed Neanderthal found by Solecki, that the species were more empathetic than thought
“There's been a big reassessment that actually started by Ralph Solecki in this cave with 'Shanidar 1' with his withered arm and his arthritis and his deafness that must have been taken care of. That tells us that there there was compassion,” he said.
Placing the bodies in the cluster in the same place, in the same position and facing the same direction involved “tradition” and “transmission of knowledge between generations,” he said.
“Exciting” and “terrifying” discovery.
“It seems much more like intentional behavior that you wouldn't associate with the textbook stories about Neanderthals, which is that their lives were nasty, brutal and short,” he added.
Pomeroy, the Cambridge palaeoanthropologist who discovered Shanidar Z, said finding its skull and upper body had been both “exciting” and “terrifying”.
The skeleton and surrounding sediment had to be reinforced in situ with a glue-like consolidant before being removed in dozens of small blocks wrapped in aluminum foil.
Lead curator Lucia Lopez-Polin assembled the more than 200 skull pieces as the first step in the facial reconstruction for the Netflix documentary “Secrets of the Neandertals.”
Pomeroy said the task had been like a “high-stakes 3D puzzle”, especially as the pieces were very soft “like a tea-soaked biscuit in consistency”.
The reconstructed skull was 3D printed and allowed paleoartists and identical twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis from the Netherlands to complete the reconstruction with layers of muscle and skin fabricated for the documentary, which was produced by the BBC Studios Science Unit.
Pomeroy said Neanderthal skulls looked very different from human skulls “with large brow ridges and a lack of chins.”
But he said the recreated face “suggests that these differences were not so marked in life”, highlighting the interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans “to the point where almost everyone alive today still has Neanderthal DNA.”
The BBC reported that researchers are confident the Neanderthal is female. Since no pelvic bones were recovered, archaeologists relied on certain dominant proteins found in tooth enamel that are associated with female genetics. The slight stature of the skeleton also supports the interpretation.
