Meet Shanidar Z, a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman

Neanderthals looked similar to humans which may explain how they interbred with us, scientists say after reconstructing an ancient skull.

Paleoartists have recreated the face of a 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal whose flattened skull was discovered and rebuilt from hundreds of bone fragments by the University of Cambridge.

Without pelvic bones, the team had to rely on sequencing tooth enamel proteins to determine her sex.

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 (1.5m) tall, and with some of the smallest adult arm bones in the Neanderthal fossil record, her physique also implies a female and probably in her mid-forties – old age in prehistory.

“The skulls of Neanderthals and humans look very different,” said Dr Emma Pomeroy, a paleo-anthropologist from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, who features in a new film on the discovery.

“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 are thought to have died out around 40,000 years ago.

The team excavated the female Neanderthal in 2018 from inside at Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, where the species had repeatedly returned to lay their dead to rest. The head had been crushed, possibly by rockfall, relatively soon after death and was then compacted further by tens of thousands of years of sediment.

When archaeologists found it, the skull was flattened to two centimetres thick.

The researchers took micro-CT scans and lead conservator Dr Lucía López-Polín pieced more than 200 bits of skull together freehand to return it to its original shape, including upper and lower jaws.

“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,” added Dr Pomeroy.

“It’s like a high-stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle. As an older female, Shanidar Z would have been a repository of knowledge for her group, and here we are seventy-five thousand years later, learning from her still.”

The rebuilt skull was surface scanned and 3D-printed, before the face was recreated by world-leading paleoartists and identical twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis.

The work was done as part of a new Netflix documentary, Secrets of the Neanderthals, produced by BBC Studios Science Unit.

BBC STUDIOS Researchers believe the skull found in 2018 belonged to a Neanderthal woman, who would have been in her mid-40s when she died.

Shanidar cave in Iraqi Kurdistan was first excavated in the 1950s. The remains of more than 10 Neanderthals have been found there.