ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The skull of a Neanderthal woman, found in the Kurdistan Region six years ago and featured in a new Netflix documentary, will be returned to the Region, a Kurdish archaeological official said on Friday.
Secrets of the Neanderthals is a BBC documentary recently featured on Netflix. It follows the work of a British team who found the broken skull of a 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal and created a 3D model of it.
Abdulwahab Sulaiman, head of Soran administration’s archeological department, said they signed a contract with the University of Cambridge in 2014, allowing the British team to do research in Erbil province’s Shanadar cave, where some Neanderthal remains had previously been found. The contract was renewed this year.
“As per the contract, the pieces that have been found should be subject to testing abroad but should be later returned to Kurdistan and the skull will be returned and added to Kurdistan Region’s museum in a formal ceremony,” he told Rudaw’s Zhyar Hakim on Friday.
“The team excavated the female Neanderthal in 2018 from inside a cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where the species had repeatedly returned to lay their dead to rest,” the University of Cambridge said in a statement on Thursday.
The find was called Shanidar Z and “researchers think it 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,” read the statement.
“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,” Dr Emma Pomeroy, a palaeo-anthropologist from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, who features in the documentary, was cited as saying by the university on Thursday.
Neanderthals, a species of humanoid thought to have gone extinct 40,000 years ago, were first discovered in the cave by American anthropologist Ralph Solecki in the 1950s. He found eight adults and two infants, some of them thought to be 65,000 years old.
In 2018, Rudaw English followed the British team while they were working in Shanadar cave.
“What we have here is the skull of a Neanderthal,” Pomeroy told Rudaw English at the time, pointing out the shape of teeth, jaw, and eye sockets.
“It’s an adult but we don’t know yet whether it’s a man or a woman. The skull has been very crushed by all of the rocks that have been on top of it, but also the weight of the soil,” she added.
She was referring to the remains of two Neanderthals found in the cave - one of which later became Shanidar Z.
“The teeth are quite worn, so it’s probably not a young adult. We would probably say it’s middle aged – maybe around 40, but that’s just a preliminary estimate,” she noted.
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.
Professor Chris Hunt, a sedimentologist from Liverpool John Moores University, who was also a member of the team, told Rudaw English in 2018 that the presence of animal remains in the soil offers an archaeological goldmine.
“Many other animals and birds live in the cave and their remains also go into the dirt. And some of those tiny remains from things like mice actually are incredibly informative about ancient temperatures. So we’re using those as a thermometer for the Neanderthals,” said Hunt.
The Netflix documentary about the discovery will boost interest in the Kurdistan Region, Dilshad Zamwa, from Sulaimani University’s archaeology department, told Rudaw English on Friday.
The discovery “will be a great potential for cultural tourism in Kurdistan,” he said, adding that featuring the documentary on Netflix “will attract a lot of foreign tourists to see this cave. It is one of the world’s important caves.”
