Face of 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman reconstructed

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Archaeologists have been able to piece together the skull of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton.

Researchers from Cambridge University and Liverpool John Moores unearthed the skull at the Shanidar Cave site, 500 miles north of Baghdad, Iraq.

As part of a new Netflix documentary, Secrets of The Neanderthals, they were able to put the skull back together and recreate the face of the woman it once belonged to.

The skull was first found in 2018, where it had been flattened to around two centimetres thick.

It had been crushed, possibly by rockfall, soon after death and compacted further by tens of thousands of years of sediment.

Archaeologists named the skeleton Shanidar Z.

‘High stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle’

To recreate the skull they had to piece together, by hand, more than 200 fragments of bone.

Using sequencing on tooth enamel proteins they were able to determine the skeleton was likely a female.

Her teeth were also used to gauge her age, thought to be in her mid-40s, through examining the levels of wear and tear with some of her front teeth worn down to the root.

Shanidar Z’s physique also suggests they were female, as they stand around five feet tall, and have some of the smallest adult arm bones in Neanderthal fossil records.

Dr Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, described putting Shanidar Z back together as a “high stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle”.

“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,” she added.

“A single block can take over a fortnight to process.”