Dr Emma Pomeroy with the skull of Shanidar Z in the Henry Wellcome Building in Cambridge, home of the University’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies.
British scientists successfully recreated the face of a 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal from a crushed skull discovered in Kurdistan. The scientists were able to reconstruct the female’s skull from hundreds of shards and then recreated her face to provide an image of what she would have looked like. The female is called “Shanidar Z.”
A new documentary about the reconstructed head called “Secrets of the Neanderthals” produced by BBC Studios Science Unit was released on Netflix worldwide. The documentary follows the team led by the universities of Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores as they return to Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where the species had repeatedly returned to lay their dead to rest.
It is believed that the skull was crushed by a falling rock after the female died.
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“The skulls of Neanderthals and humans look very different,” said Dr Emma Pomeroy, a palaeo-anthropologist from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, who features in the new film. “Neanderthal skulls have huge brow ridges and lack chins, with a projecting midface that results in more prominent noses. But the recreated face suggests those differences 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.”
Neanderthals were an extinct group of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. They were closely related to modern humans, but they had some distinct physical characteristics, such as a larger brain size, a more stocky build, and a prominent brow ridge.
Neanderthals were skilled toolmakers and hunters, and they were able to adapt to a wide range of environments, including cold glacial climates. They lived in social groups and may have had complex burial rituals.
The skull of Shanidar Z, which has been reconstructed in the lab at the University of Cambridge. Credit BBC Studios Jamie Simonds
The exact cause of the Neanderthals’ extinction is unknown, but it is likely that they were outcompeted by modern humans, who arrived in Europe from Africa around 45,000 years ago. Recent genetic studies have shown that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans, and that some modern humans have Neanderthal DNA in their genomes.
