Netflix’s Neanderthal Mysteries Reveals the Face of Shanidar Zee, One of the World’s Oldest Women

Neanderthals disappeared 40,000 years ago, taking with them many secrets. A BBC documentary streaming on Netflix from May 2 tries to uncover some of them. Director Ashley Gething examines the new evidence that makes Neanderthals more human in “Secrets of the Neanderthal” and presents a 3D model of a woman based on the remains of a 75,000-year-old skull.

The skull in question was discovered in 2018 in Iraqi Kurdistan by archaeologists from the University of Cambridge. A surprise for researchers who “didn’t expect to find more Neanderthals” in a cave closed to scientists for 50 years for political reasons.

Marker for burial of the dead

“We wanted to try to date the burials … to use the site to contribute to the larger debate about the reasons for the extinction of Neanderthals,” who cohabited with homo sapiens for several thousand years.

The Neanderthal who owned the skull was named Shanidar Z, after the cave in which the bones were discovered. She would have died at about forty years of age. Researchers believe that the large rock behind which it was found may have served as a guide for Neanderthals to bury their dead in the same place.

“Intentional behavior (that) is not like the Neanderthal textbooks, which describe brutal, short lives,” explains Chris Hunt, a professor at Liverpool John Moores University.

3D printing

In total, more than 200 skull fragments were recovered and assembled in the laboratory before 3D printing. Two renowned paleoartists then reconstructed his face, adding layers of reconstructed skin and muscle.

If Neanderthal skulls were very different from human skulls, “with huge brow ridges and almost no chin,” the face reconstructed in this way “suggests that these differences were not so noticeable,” says Cambridge University paleoanthropologist Emma Pomeroy. The reconstruction allows us to see, she says, “how interbreeding occurred between species to the extent that almost all people alive today still have Neanderthal DNA.”