Posted on 05/03/2024 11:17:40 AM PDT by Red Badger
In 2018, a female Neanderthal was discovered in the Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. Now, archaeologists from The University of Cambridge have unveiled the reconstructed face of the 75,000-year-old woman, based on the assembly of hundreds of individual bone fragments recovered during excavations.
“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 led the excavation at the cave where the woman’s remains were discovered. Neanderthals are believed to have become extinct around 40,000 years ago, and discoveries of their remains are relatively rare.
Named Shanidar Z after the location where her flattened skull was found, the woman’s remains were discovered in an area where the species had repeatedly returned to bury their dead. Believed to have been in her mid-40s based on data obtained from sequencing of tooth enamel proteins that also helped determine her sex, the Neanderthal woman was found in a sleeping position under a huge vertical stone marker.
The Shanidar Z skull (Image Credit: University of Cambridge).
Standing at just five feet tall and possessing some of the smallest adult arm bones found in the Neanderthal fossil record, her physical characteristics also suggest she was female.
“The skulls of Neanderthals and humans look very different,” says Dr. Emma Pomeroy, a palaeo-anthropologist from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology. Neanderthal skulls have huge brow ridges and lack chins, with a projecting midface that results in more prominent noses. However, the reconstructed face of the 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman suggests those differences were not so apparent in life.
“It’s perhaps easier to see how interbreeding occurred between our species,” Pomeroy said of the woman’s likeness to modern humans, “adding that almost everyone alive today still has Neanderthal DNA.”
Dr Emma Pomeroy (left) pictured with Dr Lucía López-Polín alongside the newly reconstructed face of a 75,000 year old Neanderthal woman (Image credit: Emma Pomeroy).
Featured in a new Netflix documentary, “The ‘Secrets of the Neanderthals”, produced by BBC Studios Science, the program follows a team of archeologists from the universities of Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores as they return to Shanidar Cave to continue their excavations and study remnants of our archaic ancestors.
Researchers believe that Shanidar Z could be the upper portion of an individual whose remains were initially found during excavations in 1960. The Neanderthal woman’s death may have resulted from her head being crushed by falling rocks, and soon afterward, the brain decomposed, allowing her skull to fill with soil and become flattened to around two centimeters in thickness, the state in which archeologists discovered the remains in 2018.
The skull of Shanidar Z, flattened by thousands of years of sediment and rock fall, in situ in Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan (Credit: Graeme Barker).
The Cambridge team decided the best plan would be to unearth the skeleton, after which they used a glue-like strengthening agent that would help to solidify the bones around the sediment. Shanidar Z was carefully extracted in dozens of small foil-wrapped blocks from deep within the cave, buried under seven and a half meters of soil and rock.
Once the remains were back at Cambridge, lab researchers produced micro-CT scans of each block before gradually diluting the glue and using the scans to guide the extraction of bone fragments.
“Each skull fragment is gently cleaned while glue and consolidant are re-added to stabilise the bone, which can be very soft, similar in consistency to a biscuit dunked in tea,” Pomeroy said in a statement. “It’s like a high stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle. A single block can take over a fortnight to process.”
Crucial work performed by lead conservator Dr. Lucía López-Polín saw the painstaking reassembly of more than 200 skull fragments by hand, which gradually returned portions of the skull to its original shape and form.
Kennis Brothers Reconstruction and Shanidar Z skull (Image Credit: University of Cambridge).
The reassembled skull was then surfaced scanned, and a reproduction produced using 3D printing technologies, which was used as the basis for the final reconstruction produced by paleoartists.
“It’s extremely exciting and a massive privilege actually to be able to work with the remains of any individual but especially one as special as her,” Pomeroy told BBC News.
Although remains of at least ten different Neanderthals have been discovered in the cave, Shanidar Z is the fifth found among a group of bodies buried together in close proximity and likely at around the same time.
“It’s always difficult piecing together a highly fragmented skull,” says Michael Masters Ph.D., a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University in Butte, Montana.
“The debate surrounding Sahelanthropus tchadensis as a member of the hominin clade is a good example of what’s at stake in this tenuous pursuit,” said Masters, who was not directly involved in the recent reconstruction effort, in an email to The Debrief.
“However, with new technologies and methodologies, such as those used by the Cambridge lab to reconstruct the 200 highly fragmented pieces crushed by rockfall and millennia of sedimentation, it is possible to get an accurate depiction of who this Neanderthal woman from 75,000 years ago was and what she looked like, which further adds to our understanding of this fascinating human subspecies.”
Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and founder of VOCAB Communications. She hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on The Debrief’s YouTube Channel. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton and at chrissynewton.com.
If you knew you would live to a ripe old age of 80-90 you would be relieved and take life easy as it goes.
If, on the other hand, you knew you would only live to be 20-30 or even 40, you would become hell-on-wheels uncontrollable and be a danger to yourself and others..................
Neanderthal DNA in human blood lines? Must have been some “overlap”
human ancestors entered the world in north-central Eurasia somewhere around 40,000 years ago.
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And had been around for some 260,000 years prior, according to mitochondrial DNA.
Clicked on this hoping it was more like.....
make a CT model of a living person’s skull and see how close they come
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There are many of them - used all the time in murder cases where an unknown victim has to be reconstructed, very accurate.
I saw some show many years ago where they interviewed the person that did the first facial reconstruction of a so-called Neanderthal. He just asked them what do you want it to look it? So he made it cavemanish just like they wanted. I’m sure his check cleared.
That is sort of the story behind Isaac Asimov’s ‘Spacers’ in his novels and Foundation series.
The Spacers are Earth people who went out and colonized planets in 50 solar systems beyond ours.
Hundreds of years passed and their descendants eventually come back to Earth and they are not welcomed.
The Spacers live in bubble domed cities that filter out every germ and dust particle from the Earth’s atmosphere. They are extreme germaphobes. They do not mix with Earth people and vice-versa.
They live to be 300 years old and are disdainful of Earth people who only live to be 70-90 years.
They have spaceships and superior weapon technology but they are so protective of their own lives that they cannot fight an actual war and will withdraw from a battle, whereas Earthers will fight to the death to repel them.
They eventually die off because of infertility except for one planet, Solaria, that becomes a strange place that only has a very small population of asexual (clone) reproducing people and thousands of robots to take care of them. They will also kill anyone not from there who lands on their planet.
Nah. I’m going to stick with the Bible. Humans are humans, entirely unique beings. Not saying some of them didn’t have sex with primates, because even today some deviant humans have sex with animals, but no subspecies developed. And, of course, the dates are all wrong. Either carbon dating is not accurate, or there is the “gap theory”, with Satan trying to create humanity, and failing spectacularly. God knows; it’s above my pay grade. I can live just fine without knowing the answer to everything; I’ll find out the answers to all my questions when I get to Heaven.
I don’t care how hot she was, some guy sitting in a cave somewhere was sick of her s**t.
Which one is it?
Robert Heinlein’s first published story, Lifeline, deals with that very topic.
Laz, Laz - did you hit that?
I’d like to see a side view. It looks like there is little to no slope of the forehead and doesn’t seem to match the photo of the skull.
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No wonder they went extinct.
there are plenty of people around today with faces like that.
If that were the case, then why is it that most people out of africa have about 3 percent neanderthal genes
Can it be proven that they are actually Neanderthal genes or just genes that humans share with Neanderthals?
We share more DNA with mushrooms than any other plant. Did our ancient ancestors become amorous with a fun guy?
“Ping.”
THANK YOU for pinging Laz, it took 30 posts here! Are we slipping or what? Anyway, like the rest here, I impatiently wait for the call on this one. No way on the 2 uglies in the picture, but the Neanderthal...just maybe - that is why Laz is needed.
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