Scientists from the University of Cambridge have after nine months pieced together the skull of Shanidar Z, found in the Kurdistan Region six years ago and featured in Secrets of the Neanderthals, a BBC documentary recently featured on Netflix. The documentary follows the work of a British team who found Shanidar Z’s skull and created a 3D model of it.
Shanidar Z was a Neanderthal, a species of humanoid thought to have gone extinct 40,000 years ago. Their remains were first discovered in Shanidar Cave in the Zagros Mountains by American anthropologist Ralph Solecki in the 1950s.
“We are hoping to find out the kind of foods she used to eat, whether she was born locally to the cave or she travelled, the kind of activities she used to do day-to-day, we are also finding out how old she was when she died, facts about her health,” Dr. Emma Pomeroy, a paleo-anthropologist within Cambridge’s Department of Archeology, told Rudaw’s Nma Nabaz on Saturday.
“There is a huge amount we can learn from her,” she said.
Researchers believe Shanidar Z “may be the top half of an individual excavated in 1960. The head had been crushed, possibly by rockfall, relatively soon after death - after the brain decomposed but before the cranium filled with dirt - and then compacted further by tens of thousands of years of sediment. When archaeologists found it, the skull was flattened to around two centimetres thick,” according to a Cambridge statement.
Pomeroy attributed the lengthy discovery period to the vast size of Shanidar Cave as well as the time required to secure funding for the project.
“In addition, the remains were found about 7.5 meters from the surface of the cave today, so it is very complicated as you can imagine to excavate down that deep,” she said. The skull was first spotted on September 11, 2018.
Putting together the bone fragments was “extremely challenging” and took over nine months, Pomeroy stressed.
The skull of Shanidar Z will be returned to the Kurdistan Region from the UK after necessary procedures for the conservation process are completed. Pomeroy applauded the “very generous loan” of the skull from the Region’s General Directorate of Antiquities.
“Shanidar Cave is such a rich and important archeological site. It has layers that date back to over a hundred thousand years ago,” Pomeroy said.
Life and death were present simultaneously in the cave, as evidence shows that Neanderthals buried their dead close to their living spaces.
“The evidence that we have from archeology shows that they were both burying their dead there, and Shanidar Z is one of those individuals who was buried there. But we can also see that they were living there, absolutely, and they were actually living very, very close to the places where they were burying their dead,” Pomeroy explained.
Shanidar Cave, today one of the Kurdistan Region’s most popular and picturesque tourist attractions, is a priceless vault of Paleolithic treasures.
The area today is rich with wild fauna, including wolves, deer, rodents, scorpions, and camel spiders.
