The head of a Neanderthal woman reconstructed by British researchers

(Cambridge) British researchers have managed to reconstruct the head and face of a Neanderthal woman around 75,000 years old, after a discovery which shakes up what we know about these distant cousins, often considered very archaic.

Their journey – from the discovery of a skull in Iraqi Kurdistan to this reconstruction – is told in a documentary broadcast from Thursday on Netflix and produced by the BBC.

It all started in 2018, when archaeologists from the University of Cambridge discovered the skull of a Neanderthal specimen that they called Shanidar Z, named after the cave where they found it, and which had been closed to scientists for 50 years for political reasons.

The observations allow us to conclude that it is a woman, aged around forty years old at the time of her death.

The lower part of the skeleton had already been excavated in 1960 with the remains of at least ten Neanderthals, by the American archaeologist Ralph Solecki, known for his work aimed at rehabilitating the image of this species.

The discovery of Shanidar Z’s skull, which had undoubtedly been flattened by a falling stone shortly after his death, was a real surprise for researchers.

The team “did not expect to find more Neanderthals” in the cave, Professor Graeme Barker, of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge, told AFP.

“We wanted to try to date the burials… in order to use the site (of Shanidar) to contribute to the great debate on the reasons for the disappearance of the Neanderthals”, who cohabited for a few thousand years with homo sapiens before disappearing. died out about 40,000 years ago.

Shanidar Z was part of a group of five specimens found just behind a huge vertical rock located in the center of the cave.

Researchers believe that the rock may have served as a marker to allow Neanderthals to bury their dead in the same place.

3D printing

The positioning of the body remains found, in the same position and facing the same direction, could mean that Neanderthals had a “tradition” surrounding death and that there was “a transmission of knowledge between generations”, explains Chris Hunt, a professor at Liverpool John Moores University, who participated in the research.

This “intentional behavior (…) does not resemble what is told in textbooks on Neanderthals, which describe a brutal and short life,” he adds.

Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Cambridge, explains that removing the remains of Shanidar Z was a very delicate operation.

The bones and surrounding sediment had to be reinforced on site with some sort of glue before they could be removed in many small pieces wrapped in aluminum foil.

The more than 200 fragments of the skull were then assembled in a Cambridge laboratory, in what resembled a “very valuable 3D puzzle”, especially as the fragments had a consistency “similar to that of a biscuit dipped in tea,” says Emma Pomeroy.

Once reconstructed, the skull was then 3D printed, allowing two renowned paleoartists – Dutch twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis – to reconstruct its face by applying layers of recomposed skin and muscles, a work shown in the broadcast documentary Thursday and titled “Neanderthal Secrets.”

If the skulls of Neanderthals were very different from those of humans, “with enormous brow ridges and almost no chin”, the face thus recreated “suggests that these differences were not so marked”, explains Emma Pomeroy.

This allows, according to her, to see “how crossings occurred between species, to the extent that almost all people alive today still have Neanderthal DNA”.