Meet Shanidar Z: Scientists recreate the face of a female Neanderthal whose head was flattened in a rockslide 75,000 years ago

About 75,000 years ago, a middle-aged Neanderthal woman was buried in a cave in the foothills of Iraq.

Thanks to a dedicated team of archaeologists, her face can now be revealed for the first time.

Her skeleton, named Shanidar Z, was buried by tens of thousands of years of sediment before it was first uncovered in 2018.

When experts from Cambridge University and Liverpool John Moores first discovered her skull, it had been flattened to about 2cm thick.

It was crushed relatively shortly after death, possibly by falling rocks, meaning that more than 200 pieces were pieced together freehand to return it to its original form.

Now her face has been recreated as part of a new Netflix documentary called Secrets of the Neanderthals.

Dr. Emma Pomeroy, a palaeoanthropologist from Cambridge’s Department of Archeology, said: ‘The skulls of Neanderthals and humans look very different.

‘Neanderthal skulls have huge brow ridges and no chin, with a protruding midface that results in more prominent noses. But the fake face suggests that those differences in life were not that great.

“It may be easier to see how interbreeding between our species occurred, to the extent that almost everyone alive today still has Neanderthal DNA.”

Without pelvic bones, the team relied on sequencing tooth enamel proteins to determine the sex of the skeleton – believed to be female and in her mid-40s.

At the time, this would have been a significant age to reach.

Teeth were also used to gauge her age by the degree of wear – with some front teeth worn down to the root.

At about five feet tall, and with some of the smallest adult arm bones in the Neanderthal fossil record, her body structure also points to a female.

To extract the skeleton, the team first used a glue-like consolidation agent to strengthen the bones and surrounding sediment.

They then removed Shanidar Z in dozens of small, foil-wrapped blocks of less than seven and a half meters of soil and rock in the heart of the cave, 800 kilometers north of Baghdad.

In the laboratory in Cambridge, researchers took micro-CT scans of each block before gradually diluting the glue and using the scans to guide the extraction of bone fragments.

Dr. Pomeroy said: ‘Each skull fragment is gently cleaned while glue and reinforcing agent are added again to stabilize the bone, which can be very soft and in consistency is similar to a biscuit dipped in tea.

“It’s like a high-stakes 3D puzzle. Processing one block can take fourteen days.’

The rebuilt skull was surface scanned and 3D printed to form the basis of a reconstructed head created by leading paleoartists and identical twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis, who built up layers of fabricated muscle and skin to reveal a face.

Further investigation since the discovery of Shanidar Z has found microscopic traces of charred food in the nearby soil.

These charred pieces of wild seeds, nuts and grasses suggest not only that Neanderthals prepared food – by soaking and pounding legumes – and then cooked it, but that they also did so in the presence of their dead.

“The body of Shanidar Z was within easy reach of living individuals who cooked and ate with fire,” said Dr. Pomeroy.

‘For these Neanderthals, there doesn’t seem to be such a clear separation between life and death.

‘We see that Neanderthals return to a certain place 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 woman, Shanidar Z would have been a repository of knowledge for her group, and here we are 75,000 years later and we are still learning from her.”

Neanderthals are believed to have become extinct about 40,000 years ago, and discoveries of new remains are rare.

The Neanderthal from the documentary is the first out of the cave in more than fifty years, and perhaps the best preserved individual found this century.