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Face of Neanderthal Woman Buried in Iraq Cave Revealed

The recreated head of Neanderthal woman ‘Shanidar Z’ (Jamie Simonds)
The recreated head of Neanderthal woman ‘Shanidar Z’ (Jamie Simonds)
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Face of Neanderthal Woman Buried in Iraq Cave Revealed

The recreated head of Neanderthal woman ‘Shanidar Z’ (Jamie Simonds)
The recreated head of Neanderthal woman ‘Shanidar Z’ (Jamie Simonds)

Archaeologists have reconstructed the human-like face of a Neanderthal woman who lived 75,000 years ago in a cave in northern Iraq where the extinct species may have conducted unique funerary rituals, Britain’s The Independent reported.

Bone fragments of the Neanderthal woman, named Shanidar Z, were first unearthed in 2018 from a cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where her people may have repeatedly returned to lay their dead to rest, said the report.

Although Neanderthal people, who are thought to have died out 40,000 years ago, had skulls quite different from those of humans, the rebuilt face of this Neanderthal woman – thought to have been in her forties when she died – shows that their appearance was human-like.

The findings are revealed in a new documentary, Secrets of the Neanderthals, produced by the BBC and released on Netflix worldwide.

“Neanderthal skulls have huge brow ridges and lack chins, with a projecting midface that results in more prominent noses,” said Dr. Emma Pomeroy, from Cambridge University’s archaeology department. “But the recreated face suggests those differences were not so stark in life.”

She continued: “It’s perhaps easier to see how interbreeding occurred between our species, to the extent that almost everyone alive today still has Neanderthal DNA.”

The woman’s remains, including a skull flattened to around 2cm thick, are some of the best-preserved Neanderthal fossils found this century, The Independent quoted researchers as saying.

Her head is thought to have been crushed, possibly by rockfall, soon after her death, likely after her brain decomposed but before her skull filled with dirt.

After carefully exposing the remains, including her skeleton almost to the waist, Cambridge researchers used a glue-like consolidant to strengthen the bones and surrounding sediment.

They removed Shanidar Z in small foil-wrapped blocks from under 7.5 meters of soil and rock within the heart of the “flower funeral” cave.

They then pieced together more than 200 pieces of her skull to return it to its original shape, including her upper and lower jaws.

“It’s like a high-stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle. A single block can take over a fortnight to process,” said Pomeroy, who features in the new documentary.

The researchers surface-scanned the reconstructed skull and 3D-printed it, further adding layers of fabricated muscle and skin to reveal her face.

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Varieties

Cactus Pear Is a Crop with Potential in Italy’s Parched South and Beyond

Prickly pear cactus plantation is seen in Tepeteopan, state of Puebla, Mexico January 16, 2020. Picture taken January 16, 2020. (Reuters)
Prickly pear cactus plantation is seen in Tepeteopan, state of Puebla, Mexico January 16, 2020. Picture taken January 16, 2020. (Reuters)
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Cactus Pear Is a Crop with Potential in Italy’s Parched South and Beyond

Prickly pear cactus plantation is seen in Tepeteopan, state of Puebla, Mexico January 16, 2020. Picture taken January 16, 2020. (Reuters)
Prickly pear cactus plantation is seen in Tepeteopan, state of Puebla, Mexico January 16, 2020. Picture taken January 16, 2020. (Reuters)

Global warming, drought and plant disease pose a growing threat to agriculture in Italy's arid south, but a startup founded by a former telecoms manager believes it has found a solution: Opuntia Ficus, better known as the cactus pear.

Andrea Ortenzi saw the plant's potential 20 years ago when working for Telecom Italia in Brazil, where it is widely used as animal feed. On returning to Italy he began looking at ways to turn his intuition into a business opportunity.

He and four friends founded their company, called Wakonda, in 2021, and began buying land to plant the crop in the southern Puglia region where the traditionally dominant olive trees had been ravaged by an insect-borne disease called Xylella.

The damage from the plant disease has been compounded by recurring droughts and extreme weather in the last few years all over Italy's southern mainland and islands, hitting crops from grapes to citrus fruits.

Ortenzi is convinced the hardy and versatile cactus pear, otherwise called the prickly pear or, in Italy, the Indian fig, can be a highly profitable solution yielding a raft of products such as soft drinks, flour, animal feed and biofuel.

The Italian businessman is far from alone in seeing the potential of the plant, whose cultivation is expanding in hot and dry regions around the world.

"As an industry, cactus pear production is growing rather quickly, especially for fodder use and as a source of biofuel," said Makiko Taguchi, agricultural officer at the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization headquartered in Rome.

MULTIPLE USES

The cactus produces a tasty fruit eaten in much of Latin America and the Mediterranean, while in Mexico the flat green pads that form the arms of the cactus, are used in cooking.

In Tunisia, where it covers around 12% of cultivated land, second only to olive trees, the cactus pear is a major source of income for thousands, particularly women who harvest and sell the fruit.

In Brazil, which has the world's largest production, it is mainly cultivated in the north-east for fodder, while Peru and Chile use it to extract a red dye known as Cochineal, used in food and cosmetic production.

Sportswear group Adidas and carmaker Toyota have recently shown interest in using the cactus to produce plant-based leather sourced mainly from Mexico.

The cactus pear is not yet included in the FAO's agricultural output statistics, but Taguchi cited the rapid expansion of CactusNet, a contact network of cactus researchers and businesses worldwide which she coordinates.

The FAO launched the group online in 2015 with 69 members. It now has 933 members in 82 countries. The plant, native to desert areas of south and north America, thrives in the increasingly arid conditions of Italy's south, and needs ten times less water than maize, a comparable crop whose byproducts also include animal feed and methane.

So far Wakonda, an American Indian word meaning nature's omnipresent creative force, has planted just 10 hectares of cactus with 40,000 plants per hectare, but Ortenzi plans to plant 300 hectares by the end of 2025, and he is thinking big.

Of the roughly 100,000 hectares of olive trees destroyed by Xylella in southern Puglia, only 30,000 will be replanted in the same way, he told Reuters in an interview.

"Potentially 70,000 could be planted with prickly pears," he said.

In the long run the possibilities could be even greater, Ortenzi said, considering more than a million hectares of arable land have been abandoned in Italy in recent decades as climate change has made it more difficult to produce traditional crops.

WAKONDA'S MODEL

Wakonda's business model discards the fruit and focuses instead on the prickly pads, which are pressed to yield a juice used for a highly nutritious, low-calorie energy drink. The dried out pads are then processed to produce a light flour for the food industry or a high-protein animal feed.

Wakonda's circular, ecological production system also includes "biodigester" tanks in which the waste from the output cycle is transformed into methane gas used as a bio-fuel either on site or sold.

The company, which now has 37 shareholders, is in contact with mayors, firms and universities to develop its products.

Under Ortenzi's business plan, rather than buying up land to plant the cactus, Wakonda aims to persuade farmers of its potential and then license out to them, in return for royalties, all the equipment and know-how required to exploit it.

"The land remains yours, you convert it to prickly pears and I guarantee to buy all your output for at least 15 years," Ortenzi said.