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Shanidar Z has a low forehead, wide cheekbones and a calm demeanour. With her flowing black hair and wrinkles between her eyes that look like equal parts mirth and worry, she might be someone’s wise grandmother.
Her face is a reconstruction, however. Her skull was found in a cave in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2018, where it had lain since her body was placed there, 75,000 years ago. The rest of her species would be gone a few tens of thousands of years after that. Shanidar Z is a Neanderthal.
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Last week, a team of British archaeologists revealed the reconstructed face of the woman named after Shanidar Cave, where her skull was found. The rest of her body was uncovered in 1960 by American archaeologist Ralph Solecki, who found the remains of at least 10 Neanderthals.
The way the bodies were clustered, and the presence of fragments of ancient pollen, led him to suggest that the cave might have been the site of a prehistoric funeral, complete with flowers. But even if that wasn’t the case, scientists in recent years have been rewriting the history of humanity’s closest relatives, who were once thought to be brutish, club-wielding “cavemen.”
Team member Professor Chris Hunt told news agency AFP that the pollen that gave rise to Solecki’s contentious theory might have come from bees burrowing into the cave floor. But he said the remains of a partially paralyzed Neanderthal at the same site suggests a degree of empathy not often associated with the species.
“There’s been this huge reappraisal, which was actually started by Ralph Solecki in this cave with Shanidar 1, with his withered arm and his arthritis and his deafness, who must have been looked after,” he said. “That tells us there was compassion.”
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He added: “It looks much more like purposeful behaviour that you wouldn’t associate with the textbook stories about Neanderthals, which is that their lives were nasty, brutish and short.”
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Shanidar Z, believed to be forty-something when she died, was placed in a sleeping position beneath a huge vertical stone marker that archaeologists believe was used as an identifier, to allow roaming Neanderthals to return to the same spot to bury their dead. At least five bodies were identified in a cluster, buried over a period of at least several hundred years right behind the stone.
Her skull, thought to be the best preserved Neanderthal find this century, had been flattened to just two centimetres thick, possibly by a rockfall relatively soon after she died.
Team member and paleo-anthropologist Emma Pomeroy said the task had been like a “high stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle,” especially as the fragments were very soft, “similar in consistency to a biscuit dunked in tea.”
Lead conservator Lucia Lopez-Polin pieced together more than 200 bits of skull, which was then 3D-printed to allow paleo-artists (and identical twins) Adrie and Alfons Kennis in The Netherlands to complete the reconstruction with layers of fabricated muscle and skin.
The completed reconstruction can be seen in the new Netflix documentary Secrets of the Neanderthals, produced by the BBC Studios Science Unit and narrated by Sir Patrick Stewart.
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