Face of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman revealed by scientists

[brooklynite]

Source: NBC News

LONDON — She looks pretty good for 75,000 years old.

Particularly given that her skull was smashed into 200 pieces, possibly by a rockfall, before it was meticulously pieced together by scientists over the last six years.

This is Shanidar Z, a Neanderthal woman whose face was recreated by archaeologists at England’s University of Cambridge. By reimagining her facial features, rather than just the skull itself, the university said a report published on its website Thursday, that experts have been given new insight into what our ancient cousins actually looked like.

Turns out they may have been more similar than we thought — both in terms of their facial features and their thoughts about death.

Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/neanderthal-woman-face-reconstructed-iraq-scientists-cave-rcna150344

[intrepidity]

1. She looks great for her age! nt

[Arne]

2. Granny!

[Mr.Bill]

3. There's a congressional district in Georgia where

she could get elected to Congress.

[Maraya1969]

4. OMG I see the similarity!

[LeftInTX]

5. You have a good eye! LOL

I knew there was something about her.

[GB_RN]

7. Ouch.

You’re insulting someone, who, from all available evidence, was part of a society of nurturing and caring people.

On the other hand, there’s not one iota of evidence that MAGAt Traitor Greene has one picogram of nurturing or caring ability within her…body. 🤢🤮

I’d trade any number of Neanderthals for MAGAt Greene. Any day. Without hesitation. 😁🤘🖖

[orangecrush]

9. +1

[calimary]

15. Same here. Definitely.

Last edited Fri May 3, 2024, 08:53 PM - Edit history (2)

As you put it: "I’d trade any number of Neanderthals for MAGAt Greene. Any day. Without hesitation." Excellent, GB_RN!!!

[Bev54]

11. I think she is better looing than the one in Georgia

[Mr.Bill]

12. Probably more intelligent, too. n/t

[dalton99a]

18. +1

[Martin68]

25. That is a sick and disgusting comment. She was a person. Show a little respect.

[multigraincracker]

6. That brow, chin and smile,

for some reason it reminds me of MTG.

[sanatanadharma]

8. No one has ever lived at any time other than the most modern of times

"Turns out they may have been more similar than we thought — both in terms of their facial features and their thoughts about death."

The body wrapper changes (obviously) in life and time. It is a mistake to assume the conscious-beingness wrapped in a past body was somehow less 'conscious-being' than we are today.
Everyone, then and now, lives in the most modern of times.

I like the Mona Lisa smile and accepting eyes. Indeed, accepting "I"s are the best.

[WheelWalker]

32. Not to confuse the packaging with the package.

[StarryNite]

10. She lived

What was she like? Was she kind and nurturing? Who did she love? Who loved her? Did she have children? What was her life like?

[Chainfire]

13. Is that MGT without the blonde hair?

[Martin68]

26. Enough with the juvenile jokes. This was a real person. Stop demeaning yourself and the scientists and artists who

accomplished this amazing feat.

[usaf-vet]

28. Exactly!

[Aussie105]

36. I'm sure this particular lady

is beyond caring.

I don't think people lived that long in those days, so I'm guessing the age she is portrayed at is a bit too old?

[Martin68]

43. I care. I'm not going to second guess highly rained forensic anthropologists.

[Polybius]

45. Where did it say her age?

I looked through the entire article and didn't see anything.

[Martin68]

47. What is your point? Facial reconstruction its based on bone structure, not age. Jus because she looks old to your eyes,

it doesn't follow that her appearance is due to age.

[Polybius]

49. My point is that i was responding to the other poster

One poster said they usually don't live as long as she did, and I was curious because the article didn't mention anything (that I saw) about her age. Is that ok?

[Martin68]

51. Yes, that's very ok. I'm sorry if I came across as unpleasant. The comments about age and flippant quips about the woman

made me uncomfortable. You were just asking an innocent question. My bad!

[Polybius]

53. It's all good!

[Chainfire]

42. No, that image is an artist conception of what this protohuman may have looked like. It is a fantasy.

I have serious doubts if the scientist can even acertain that it was a woman's skull. There are for more serious issues in life to get upset over.

[LeftInTX]

46. Her sex was determined by DNA from her tooth enamel. Bone structure is fairly straight forward.

However, skin pigment, eye color (current belief are that blue eyes are only 10,000 yo), hair color, hair texture, eye shape, body hair are all speculation. For some reason eye color is one of the most accurate DNA markers in humans. Hair texture, hair color, skin pigment aren't as accurate. There are also disease markers that are studied in ancient humans.

[catsudon]

14. now use ai to de-age

i'd like to see what they look like from young to old.

[Warpy]

16. There are better pictures

https://www.sciencealert.com/meet-shanidar-z-75000-year-old-neanderthal-womans-face-reconstructed

I knew someone who looked remarkably like her. I doubt modern humans saw all that many differences between themselves and the Neanderthal. 75,000 years ago was when Mt. Toba blew up, the climate turned on a dime, and both populations needed to pool resources and knowhow in order to survive.

[Marcuse]

17. 23 and thee.

[twodogsbarking]

19. No eyebrows or did she pluck them?

[ananda]

20. MTG

...

[mpcamb]

21. Seriously now, that (and I may be in trouble for saying it) is a Native American face.

[Martin68]

24. No, it is not a Native American face. It is a Neanderthal face. The differences are quite obvious.

[AllaN01Bear]

22. neat.

[Martin68]

23. Will posters please stop the agist, misogynistic, and foolish comments on how good she looks for her age? The article

already made the joke so you're just repeating yourselves. In actual fact, the recreation of this woman's face is a remarkable scientific and artistic feat, and it is awesome to see how this woman from so long ago might really have looked. Stop making adolescent jokes about the appearance of this person who actually existed. Show a little respect.

[usaf-vet]

27. Wow. Science has brought us wonderful insight into our pass. Now 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman. That doesn't .....

....... match up to the belief of some that our past is only 6000 years old.

They don't understand science, so they choose to believe that humans and dinosaurs walk the earth at the same time.

Sadly, not only do some current adults believe the 6000-year-old tale, but they also choose to keep their children ignorant of the facts that science has to offer.

No wonder we have a large, ignorant country of voters.

My generation of parents wanted their children to be prepared to move into adulthood with the knowledge and skills that allow them to succeed and thrive in an ever-changing world.

It seems that some parents and community elders want their children to inherit their grandparents' and great-grandparents' knowledge and skill sets. They think that if it was good enough for the prior generations, it should be good enough for our current generation.

[brooklynite]

30. Get thee behind me SATAN!

Clearly the bones were planted by the Prince of Darkness.....

[relayerbob]

29. MJT is older than we thought

[LeftInTX]

31. I'm watching the documentary on Netflix.

&ab_channel=Netflix

Neanderthal ethnic admixture is about 75% Sub-saharan Africa and most of the rest is North East Africa.


29 K yo Neanderthal from Russia. (They all pretty much have DNA like this)

[muriel_volestrangler]

33. I don't understand what that pie chart is trying to tell us

1.37% of what set of genes are "Baltic"? What is a "Baltic gene"? What does the 100% represent? You talk about a 29,000 year old Neanderthal found in Russia. Are you saying that all the ancestors of Neanderthals can be divided up into the listed regions, and they know that 5% of their DNA came from Neanderthals in Oceania, but none from the continent of Asia between Oceania and Russia? That sounds very unlikely to me. It's a long way to travel in one generation, for a Neanderthal.

[Aussie105]

35. Wrong interpretation.

Current Baltic genotype has some Neanderthal commonality.

Thousands of years of people moving about the globe will do that.
Many generations in fact.

[muriel_volestrangler]

37. Your sentence "Current Baltic genotype has some Neanderthal commonality" may be true

but what has that got to do with the pie chart? What do 1.37% Baltic, 5.25% Oceanian, 22.34% North-East African and 70.05% Sub-Saharan African add up to 100% of? What has it got to do with a 29,000 yea old Neanderthal?

[LeftInTX]

39. It's cool! Right!

[LeftInTX]

38. It's from GedMatch. It's DNA markers and what modern populations the DNA matches with.

Sort of a past time I have
It's not where the person has been. It's how it matches with living populations.

Here is a partial list of ancient DNA samples


You select a kit and put it in a calculator
There are about five Neanderthals on the list:


Here are my DNA results


Here is my Oracle
It's pretty accurate: I'm 1/2 Armenian and 1/2 Mostly British Isles..

Keep in mind admixtures are estimates. It's saying based on the Eurogene calculator, I am most like this populations. The 2.1 is accuracy. The smaller the number, the closer the match.
There are numerous calculators on GedMatch and results each vary slightly.



Here is the Oracle for the Neanderthal:


All of the Neanderthals are primarily African. I find it very interesting.
You can run all the ancient DNA samples. It's fun! I can also run the DNA of any kit number.

Here is a relative who is 100% Armenian


Admixture is not 100% accurate. However, the fact that all the Neanderthals are mostly Sub-saharan African (SSA) in their admixtures, indicates that genetically, they were mostly Sub-saharan African with some North East African. However, admixture does not equal appearance. They may have been SSA, but their features may have changed due to adaptation to cold climate.

Lots of modern people carry traces from other continents of which they have no connection with. So small percentages are quite common. Lots of my matches are like 1% SSA or 1% South Asian. 1% Oceanic is also common. So is !-2% NA, with Eastern Europeans.

I'm in a FB Group and that's what we do!

Oh and the Doe DNA Project uses GedMatch. They are volunteers and some of their work is shared publicly. Here is their spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O2GYCflA5CpOWkp-XBHaExE6_ocVNbJN/edit#gid=82211262

[muriel_volestrangler]

41. It's meaningless for the Neanderthal

It does not mean "the Neanderthals were African". The "North East African" that a modern DNA database has as a reference is North East Africans from long after 29,000 years ago. The Neanderthal's genes could not be made up of sets of genes from after they lived. North East Africans may well have inherited some Neanderthal genes, but so have various groups that are listed as "-" in the picture in #31, such as West Mediterranean.

In one sense, we (and Neanderthals) are all 100% African - all humans descend from a population in Eastern Africa, a few hundred thousand years ago. But when someone defines group as 'Baltic' etc., you're looking at a moment in time where they reckon there was little enough migration to be able to fix groups, and their genes, to those points. That might be 1492 CE, or a general "people who think their ancestors were all in this area in the 19th century", or similar. But it's well after 29,000 BCE.

(on reload, your pictures did show up for me)

[Aussie105]

34. I was going to say there is a lot of guess work involved.

Like the hair, skin, eye color.

But then I read this:

"Neanderthal ethnic admixture is about 75% Sub-Saharan Africa and most of the rest is North East Africa."

So they have it right.

My wife is 2% Sub-Saharan African - is she Neanderthal, slightly?

She can trace those genes back about 4 generations.
All the way back to - you guessed it - a female slave from Africa.

[LeftInTX]

40. What's weird is: Neanderthals carried mostly African genes, but modern Africans do not carry the Neanderthal genes.

Neanderthals were part of the migration out of Africa. They lived their life in Eurasia. And eventually became a distinct Home sapien who had different ethnic/traits etc than Africans. They didn't return to Africa, but instead their genes were spread around Eurasia. I have read that Native Americans surprisingly, carry the highest percentage of Neanderthal genes, even though Neanderthal's never lived in North America!

Yes, the appearance is pretty much guess work. There are markers for eye and hair color etc. Bone structure of Neanderthal drawings has remained the same over the years.

[snot]

48. I think there's been a tendency to assume

...that because Homo Sapiens prevailed, they must have been smarter or better; but I've sometimes wondered whether they might just have been more sociopathic.

[Aussie105]

50. Homo sapiens prevailed?

Nope, the locals bred with the incoming Neanderthals.

No prevailing involved, just one big melting pot.

Most of us are a mixture of genes from different parts of history and the world.

Makes me laugh at 'white supremacists' - most of them are unlikely to be 'pure', whatever that means to them.

'Racial purity' is a concept that doesn't apply in the real world.

Biologists will tell you outbreeding - mixing diverse gene pools together - is a good thing.
Inbreeding, sticking to a small local gene pool, isn't.

Breeders of pedigree dogs will agree. Importing fresh blood to improve the breed.
(Any labrador breeders reading this?)

[snot]

54. My understanding is that only ca. 2%

of modern humans' genes are understood as having come from the Neanderthals.

[John Shaft]

52. An apex predator

who developed the means to make itself extinct or close to it.