Face Of 75,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Woman Revealed

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A UK team of archaeologists has revealed the reconstructed face of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman

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She has been named as Shanidar Z after the cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, where her skull was found in 2018

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The lower part of her skeleton is believed to have been excavated in 1960 during excavations by American archaeologist Ralph Solecki

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Shanidar Z's skull had been flattened to a thickness of two centimetres, possibly by a rockfall relatively soon after she died

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Shanidar Z is the fifth body to be identified in the cluster buried over a period of at least several hundred years right behind the rock in the centre of the cave

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Archaeologists believe the stone was used as an identifier to allow itinerant Neanderthals to return to the same spot to bury their dead.

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Emma Pomeroy, the Cambridge paleo-anthropologist who uncovered Shanidar Z, said finding her skull and upper body had been both "exciting" and "terrifying".

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The skeleton and the surrounding sediment had to be strengthened in place with a glue-like consolidant before being removed in dozens of small foil-wrapped blocks.

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Lead conservator Lucia Lopez-Polin then pieced together the over 200 bits of skull as the first step in the facial reconstruction for the just-released Netflix documentary "Secrets of the Neanderthals"

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The rebuilt skull was then 3D-printed, allowing paleoartists to complete the reconstruction with layers of fabricated muscle and skin for the documentary

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