75,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Woman's Face Reconstructed from Crushed Skull

A team of archaeologists and conservators led by the University of Cambridge has recreated the face of a 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal whose skull was discovered crushed in an Iraqi cave where Neanderthals repeatedly returned to bury their dead.

The reconstruction, featured in the Netflix documentary "Secrets of the Neanderthals," offers a glimpse into the appearance of our closest evolutionary relatives and suggests the differences between Neanderthals and modern humans may have been less stark than previously thought.

Discovery in Shanidar Cave

The skull, named Shanidar Z, was excavated in 2018 from Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, a site made famous in 1960 when several Neanderthals were unearthed that appeared to have been buried in succession. The cave has yielded remains of at least ten separate Neanderthals, with Shanidar Z being the first discovered in over fifty years and perhaps the best-preserved individual found this century.

When archaeologists uncovered the skull, it was flattened to around two centimeters thick, having been crushed by rockfall relatively soon after death and then compacted by tens of thousands of years of sediment. The team carefully exposed the remains, including an articulated skeleton almost to the waist, and removed the remains in dozens of small foil-wrapped blocks from under seven and a half meters of soil and rock.

The Reconstruction Process

In the 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. Lead conservator Dr. Lucía López-Polín pieced together over 200 bits of skull freehand to return it to its original shape, including upper and lower jaws.

"It's like a high stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle," said Dr. Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist from Cambridge's Department of Archaeology. "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 paleoartists and identical twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis, who built up layers of fabricated muscle and skin to reveal a face.

Who Was Shanidar Z?

New analysis strongly suggests that Shanidar Z was an older female, perhaps in her mid-forties according to researchers - a significant age to reach so deep in prehistory. Without pelvic bones, the team relied on sequencing tooth enamel proteins to determine her sex. Teeth were also used to gauge her age through levels of wear and tear, with some front teeth worn down to the root.

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.

Burial Practices and Neanderthal Culture

Shanidar Z was found in a cluster of bodies buried at a similar time in the same location: right behind a huge vertical rock, over two meters tall at the time, which sits in the center of the cave. The rock had come down from the ceiling long before the bodies were interred and may have served as a landmark for Neanderthals to identify a particular site for repeated burials.

Site analysis suggests that Shanidar Z was laid to rest in a gully formed by running water that had been further hollowed out by hand to accommodate the body. Posture indicates she had been leant against the side, with her left hand curled under her head, and a rock behind the head like a small cushion, which may have been placed there.

While remnants of at least ten separate Neanderthals have now come from the cave, Shanidar Z is the fifth to be found in this burial cluster. In fact, while filming onsite for the new 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.

Evidence of Neanderthal Sophistication

Decades after the original discoveries, the Cambridge-led team retraced earlier excavations, aiming to use the latest techniques to retrieve more evidence for claims about Neanderthal burial practices. While a study led by Professor Chris Hunt of Liverpool John Moores University now suggests pollen found around one body was left by bees burrowing into the cave floor rather than indicating a flower burial, other evidence points to Neanderthal sophistication.

For example, remains from Shanidar Cave show signs of an empathetic species. One male had a paralyzed arm, deafness, and head trauma that likely rendered him partially blind, yet had lived a long time, so must have been cared for.

Further research since Shanidar Z was found has detected microscopic traces of charred food in the soil around the older body cluster. These carbonized 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 Pomeroy. "For these Neanderthals, there does not appear to be that clear separation between life and death."

Implications for Understanding Neanderthals

The reconstructed face suggests that the differences between Neanderthals and modern humans were not so stark in life. "It's perhaps easier to see how interbreeding occurred between our species, to the extent that almost everyone alive today still has Neanderthal DNA," said Pomeroy.

"Neanderthals have had a bad press ever since the first ones were found over 150 years ago," said Professor 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 discoveries at Shanidar Cave provide an ideal laboratory to tackle one of the biggest questions of human evolution: 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?

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, learning from her still.