Shanidar Z — The 75,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Woman Whose Crushed Skull Was Rebuilt From More Than 200 Pieces
She was female in a species where sex determination from juvenile or fragmentary remains is difficult but where the adult skeleton speaks more clearly.
She was part of a community that returned to this cave repeatedly, that placed its dead in a specific part of the cave floor, and that in some documented cases oriented the body deliberately.
The skull that had to be rebuilt fragment by fragment was not simply broken by time.
It had been compressed by the weight of the earth above it, flattened against the cave floor over tens of thousands of years.
The reconstruction required technology that did not exist when the cave was first excavated, and expertise accumulated through decades of work in forensic science and paleoanthropology.
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