MEET Shanidar Z, one of the most important Neanderthal discoveries in a generation. Her remains, thought to date back 75,000 years, were fully unearthed five years ago in a re-excavation of a legendary archaeological site, Shanidar cave, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
She appears to have been deliberately interred along with a cluster of nine other Neanderthal men, women and children, whose skeletons were uncovered from the 1950s onwards and transformed our understanding of Neanderthals. Far from being primitive brutes, as they are often portrayed, the remains revealed that these ancient hominins cared for the injured and the dead, and may even have put flowers in burial sites. So the recent discovery of another member of this cluster, Shanidar Z, was especially exciting.
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With today鈥檚 forensic technologies, she is the key to unlocking the secrets of this Neanderthal group. 鈥淲e have got this opportunity to get new insights into what this cluster was doing with their dead,鈥� says at the University of Cambridge, pictured below with the reconstruction. 鈥淲e can also get a better idea about what it was like to be a female Neanderthal,鈥� says Pomeroy, who was part of the team that discovered this fossil.
When the skeleton was found, her skull, shown in the second image, was crushed flat. It took more than a year of painstaking work to put the pieces back together in 3D form. This skull was then used by Dutch twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis, famous for their remarkable reconstructions of ancient hominins, to create a model of what she might have looked like, shown below.
The duo are pictured below with the 3D print-out of Shanidar Z鈥檚 skull 鈥� which was unveiled this week. 鈥淚t鈥檚 really amazing. You can see some differences like the brow ridges, but a lot of how she looks is actually very human,鈥� says Pomeroy.
Unfortunately Shanidar Z鈥檚 DNA didn鈥檛 survive, so her genome couldn鈥檛 be sequenced, but there is still much to learn from the remains. Chemical traces in tartar on her teeth are being analysed to reveal what her diet consisted of. Her front teeth were also worn down to stumps. 鈥淭hey were probably used like a third hand, to do things like processing hide,鈥� says Pomeroy, pictured below working on the skull.
After so long buried in Shanidar cave, pictured below, Shanidar Z is now in the limelight as part of a new documentary, , on Netflix.
