Meet Shanidar Z: Scientists recreate the face of a female Neanderthal whose head was FLATTENED during a rock slide 75,000 years ago

Around 75,000 years ago, a middle-aged Neanderthal woman was buried in a cave in the foothills of Iraq.

Now, thanks to a dedicated team of archaeologists, her face can be revealed for the first time.

Named Shanidar Z, her skeleton had been buried by tens of thousands of years of sediment before first being uncovered in 2018.

When experts from Cambridge University and Liverpool John Moores first discovered her skull, it had been flattened to around 2cm thick.

It had been crushed, possibly by rockfall, relatively soon after death, meaning more than 200 pieces were pieced together freehand to return it to its original shape.

When experts from Cambridge University and Liverpool John Moores first discovered her skull, it had been flattened to around 2cm thick

Now, her face has been recreated as part of a new Netflix documentary called Secrets of the Neanderthals.

Dr Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, said: ‘The skulls of Neanderthals and humans look very different.

‘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.’

Without pelvic bones, the team relied on sequencing tooth enamel proteins to determine the sex of the skeleton – believed to be female and aged in her mid-forties.

At the time, this would have been a significant age to reach.

Teeth were also used to gauge her age through levels of wear and tear – with some front teeth worn down to the root.

At around five feet tall, and with some of the smallest adult arm bones in the Neanderthal fossil record, her physique also implies a female.

Her skull had been crushed, possibly by rockfall, relatively soon after death, meaning more than 200 pieces were pieced together freehand to return it to its original shape

The rebuilt skull was surface scanned and 3D-printed, forming the basis of a reconstructed head created by world-leading paleo artists and identical twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis, who built up layers of fabricated muscle and skin to reveal a face.

To extract the skeleton, the team first used a glue-like consolidant to strengthen the bones and surrounding sediment.

Then, they removed Shanidar Z in dozens of small foil-wrapped blocks from under seven-and-a-half metres of soil and rock within the heart of the cave 500 miles north of Baghdad.

In the Cambridge lab, researchers took micro-CT scans of each block before gradually diluting the glue and using the scans to guide extraction of bone fragments.

Dr Pomeroy said: ‘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.

‘It’s like a high stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle. A single block can take over a fortnight to process.’

The rebuilt skull was surface scanned and 3D-printed, forming the basis of a reconstructed head created by world-leading paleo artists and identical twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis, who built up layers of fabricated muscle and skin to reveal a face.

View of the entrance to Shanidar Cave, within the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdistan region in northern Iraq

Further research since Shanidar Z was found has detected microscopic traces of charred food in the nearby soil.

These carbonised bits of wild seeds, nuts and grasses suggest not only that Neanderthals prepared food – soaking and pounding pulses – and then cooked it, but did so in the presence of their dead.

‘The body of Shanidar Z was within arm’s reach of living individuals cooking with fire and eating,’ Dr Pomeroy said.

‘For these Neanderthals, there does not appear to be that clear separation between life and death.

‘We can see that Neanderthals are coming back to one particular spot to bury their dead. This could be decades or even thousands of years apart.

‘Is it just a coincidence, or is it intentional, and if so what brings them back?

‘As an older female, Shanidar Z would have been a repository of knowledge for her group, and here we are 75,000 years later, learning from her still.’

Neanderthals are thought to have died out around 40,000 years ago, and the discoveries of new remains are few and far between.

The Neanderthal featured in the documentary is the first from the cave for over fifty years, and perhaps the best preserved individual to be found this century.

A close relative of modern humans, Neanderthals went extinct 40,000 years ago

The Neanderthals were a close human ancestor that mysteriously died out around 40,000 years ago.

The species lived in Africa with early humans for millennia before moving across to Europe around 300,000 years ago.

They were later joined by humans, who entered Eurasia around 48,000 years ago.  

The Neanderthals were a cousin species of humans but not a direct ancestor – the two species split from a common ancestor –  that perished around 50,000 years ago. Pictured is a Neanderthal museum exhibit

These were the original ‘cavemen’, historically thought to be dim-witted and brutish compared to modern humans.

In recent years though, and especially over the last decade, it has become increasingly apparent we’ve been selling Neanderthals short.

A growing body of evidence points to a more sophisticated and multi-talented kind of ‘caveman’ than anyone thought possible.

It now seems likely that Neanderthals had told, buried their dead, painted and even interbred with humans.   

They used body art such as pigments and beads, and they were the very first artists, with Neanderthal cave art (and symbolism) in Spain apparently predating the earliest modern human art by some 20,000 years.

They are thought to have hunted on land and done some fishing. However, they went extinct around 40,000 years ago following the success of Homo sapiens in Europe.