A face that is more than 75,000 years old

Scientists’ curiosity to know what humans were like thousands of years ago has succeeded thanks to a team from the University of Cambridge and John Moores of the University of Liverpool, who have recreated the face of a Neanderthal who lived for 75,000 years in a documentary. First from 200 small bones of a restored skull.

Researchers reconstructed the skull of this woman, which was found in 2018 in a cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, where this species went to bury its dead.

Now, Documentary Neanderthal mysteryProduced by the BBC Studios Science Unit, allows us to discover the characteristics of this species, which disappeared 40,000 years ago.

Although there are notable differences between the skulls of Neanderthals and their sapiensAs highlighted by paleoanthropologist Emma Pomeroy of Cambridge University, this is not the case for highly similar faces. “It is perhaps easier to see how interbreeding occurred between our species, to the extent that Neanderthal DNA is present in almost all people today.”

According to a recent analysis, these remains of an elderly woman named Shanidar Jade would have been a source of knowledge for her group and here we are, still learning from them 75,000 years later,” Pomeroy explained.

This Neanderthal’s skull, only the upper half of which was found, appeared completely deformed, crushed soon after death and compressed by the weight of sediment over the years.