Shanidar Z — The 75,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Woman Whose Crushed Skull Was Rebuilt From More Than 200 Pieces
Her brow is heavy, her features broad.
Her expression is neutral in the way that reconstructed faces are neutral, since expression requires muscle and inference.
But the eyes — placed there by the artist according to the best available evidence about Neanderthal anatomy — create the impression of looking.
When people see this image, many of them feel something.
Not the academic curiosity of a researcher reading a technical paper, but something more immediate — a recognition, however partial, of a face that is both deeply familiar and visibly different from any face they have seen before.
That response is itself data, in a way.
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