Meet Ned the Neanderthal on TV, 50,000 years after his death
Ancestor’s face recreated as CGI brings him to life
The face of a Neanderthal has been revealed some 50,000 years after his death following a reconstruction by an expert from Dundee University.
Dr Christopher Rynn, from the university’s Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, helped bring “Ned” back to life for new BBC series Neanderthals: Meet Your Ancestors, which airs tomorrow.
Dr Rynn was able to reconstruct the face using a fossil Neanderthal skull found in Iraq.
Taking a range of clues from the bone structure, Dr Rynn was able to establish that Ned was probably in his 30s when he died and suffered a severe head injury in his teens.
Dr Rynn said: “Having reconstructed Ned’s face, I am as excited as anyone to see how he looks in the final show and to see what the producers have done with him.
“I have been bursting to tell people about this since the filming took place almost a year ago but was sworn to secrecy so I’m relieved I can finally talk about the show.
“I was working from a plastic cast of Ned’s skull, which tells a story in itself. Ned was in his 30s when he died, but the skull shows he had received a severe head injury when he was in his teens.
“The severity and location of the injury means he would likely have been blind and deaf on the left side, while the withered nature of the right side of his skeleton means he would have been quite severely disabled.
“Despite this, he lived for another 20 years after his injury and was found with other members of his family.
“He would have been unable to care for himself so this provided the first evidence that Neanderthals looked after each other.”
Dr Rynn appears in the programme alongside Hollywood star Andy Serkis, co-founder of digital performance-capture studio The Imaginarium, and Ella Al-shamahi, a rising star in the field of Neanderthal research.
After Dr Rynn reconstructed Ned’s face, a team of scientists then began the laborious process of working out what Ned’s body was like, building up layers from the fossil skeleton to create a digital Neanderthal.
Then, the same type of motion capture technology that helped Serkis star as Gollum in Lord of the Rings and Caesar in Planet of the Apes was used to create the first scientifically accurate, 3D working avatar of a Neanderthal.
With the help of CGI technology, the show’s producers were able to reconstruct a Neanderthal hunt and model their voices 40,000 years after they died out.
In the climax of the investigation, the team wanted to see how well Neanderthals would blend in to modern society – and put Ned amongst commuters on a busy Tube train.
According to recent scientif- ic research, the Neanderthals are not the knuckle-dragging apemen of popular imagination and around 2 per cent of most people’s DNA is of Neanderthal origin.
While Neanderthals were smaller than modern humans, they were also much stronger and faster.
New archaeological research is also revealing intriguing details about Neanderthal living, including their preference for dressing in vulture feathers.
Neanderthals: Meet Your Ancestors is on BBC2 at 8pm tomorrow.
Homo sapiens have a tendency to look down on other kinds of humans. We survived so, clearly, we were superior.
The word neanderthal not only refers to the extinct species but to someone considered to be particularly rude, brutish or uncouth.
However the reality may have been different. Scientific evidence suggests neanderthals cared for one another, looking after injured family members. They are also thought to have held burial rituals, made cave paintings, and even used the penicillium fungus, the natural antibiotic from which penicillin is derived, and poplar bark, which contains salicylic acid, used in aspirin and other painkillers.
New reconstructions of neanderthals showing what they would have looked like in modern settings – by experts at Dundee University – could perhaps help popular imagination catch up with the changing message conveyed by such research. And we should remember that, while they died out as a distinct species about 40,000 years ago, they still live on in us all, making up a fiftieth of the average modern human’s DNA.