Named Shanidar Z after the cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where her skull was found in 2018, it is the latest discovery that has led experts to investigate the mystery of the 40-year-old Neanderthal woman resting in a sleeping position under a huge vertical stone rock.
The woman’s skull, fragmented into 200 pieces and flattened into a 2cm-thick layer, was found in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Shanidar Cave, where the skeletons of at least ten Neanderthals had been discovered in the 1950s.
When a group of British researchers received permission to re-examine the cave Shanidar Z’s skeleton from the waist up.
“The skull was flat as a pizza,” Graham Barker of the University of Cambridge, who led the excavation, told the BBC.
Pelvic bones, by which sex is usually determined in ancient skeletons, were absent. However, the research team applied a relatively new technique of analyzing traces of proteins in the teeth, which indicate that it is a woman.
The woman was around 1.5 meters tall, had a large head and was about 40 years old, although uncertainty about this estimate is high.
“We can’t be 100 percent sure she wasn’t older,” Pomeroy said. “What we can say is that he was someone who lived a relatively long life. For that society, she would probably be important in terms of her knowledge and experience.”
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