VIDEO | Here is the face of Shanidar Z, a Neanderthal woman who lived 75 thousand years ago
In a BBC documentary released by Netflix, the face of a Neanderthal woman is reconstructed in 3D: she was renamed Shanidar Z and lived 75 thousand years ago
ROME – A documentary that “analyses the mysteries of the Neanderthals and what the fossil finds reveal to us about their lives and their disappearance”. It is the new BBC documentary “Secrets of the Neanderthals”, which has just landed on the Netflix streaming platform. The documentary is based on the work of the University of Cambridge, whose team was assisted bya couple of Dutch 3D artists. And it is precisely thanks to this work that in the new documentary it is possible to see the face of Shanidar Z move, a woman who lived about 75 thousand years ago, who probably died at the age of 40 years old and about one meter and 50 centimeters tall.
Shanidar Z was found in 2018 in a cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, already ‘famous’ for other important finds. She had been buried inside a ravine in the cave: she had her left hand folded under her head and a rock positioned behind her head, perhaps as a pillow. Well, Cambridge scientists reconstructed the woman’s skull by assembling the skull from 200 bone fragments, which were transported to Great Britain. And then, working on the contours of the face, they carried out a 3D reconstruction. The Dutch artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis then gave the woman a face.
THE SKULLS OF THE NEANDERTHALS
One of the researchers who discovered Shanidar Z, Emma Pomeroy, also appears in the documentary. And he explains: “The skulls of Neanderthals and our species are very different. In fact, those of Neanderthals presentenormous superciliary archesand do not have a real chin. Furthermore, their face is more protruding, a condition that it made theirnoses more prominent“.
NEANDERTHALS IN IRAQ
The latest studies by scientists on Neanderthals are giving rise to new ideas about this population: they were not, in fact, as stupid as they were initially thought to be. According to experts, they were probably very similar to today’s men on a cognitive level. What were they doing in Iraq? The most likely thing is that they were fleeing from the ice caps which at that time (we are talking about 75 thousand years ago) covered a good part of Europe and Northern Asia.