The face of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman was reconstructed by a team of scientists in England — revealing that the extinct race likely looked more like humans than researchers previously thought.
Archaeologists at the University of Cambridge in England painstakingly pieced together 200 parts of the cave woman’s smashed skull to recreate her facial features, the university said in a report published on its website Thursday.
They found that the prehistoric lady, known as Shanidar Z, had a less prominent eyebrow line, a stronger chin and a smaller nose than previously associated with Neanderthals, the university said.
Her re-imagined mug — which features a soft grin and well-defined cheekbones — makes it easier to see how humans once procreated with the smaller, stalkier race, said palaeo-anthropolgist Emma Pomeroy.
“Neanderthal skulls have huge brow ridges and lack chins, with a projecting midface that results in more prominent noses. But the recreated face suggests those differences were not so stark in life,” she said in a report.
“It’s perhaps easier to see how interbreeding occurred between our species, to the extent that almost everyone alive today still has Neanderthal DNA.”
Shanidar Z — who is among the best preserved Neanderthals found this century — was discovered with her face likely crushed by a rockslide in a cave in Iraq in 2018.
To rebuild her face, archeologist Lucía López-Polín pieced together more than 200 bits of her skull freehand including upper and lower jaws, according to the report.
“It’s like a high-stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle. A single block can take over a fortnight to process,” said Pomeroy. “Each skull fragment is gently cleaned while glue and consolidant are re-added to stabilize the bone, which can be very soft, similar in consistency to a biscuit dunked in tea.”
Neanderthals were shorter and stockier than humans with large noses for warming and humidifying cold air in regions where they lived.
Neandertals and “anatomically modern” humans lived in the same geographic area for roughly 30,000 years following human migration out of Africa, according to the National Institutes of Health.
During that time, Neanderthals and humans interbred.
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