Returning to the physical question the headline raises — how do you actually rebuild a skull from more than two hundred fragments — the answer involves both traditional conservation techniques and the digital tools that have transformed bioarchaeology in the past twenty years.

The physical fragments extracted from Shanidar Cave were first stabilized with conservation materials that stopped ongoing deterioration without altering the bone itself.

Each fragment was then CT-scanned: high-resolution X-ray imaging that captures the three-dimensional geometry of the bone down to fractions of a millimeter.

The resulting digital models were assembled in specialized software that allows researchers to rotate, position, and test-fit fragments against one another in three dimensions.

The software can recognize anatomical features — the curvature of the cranial vault, the specific geometry of suture lines, the characteristic shapes of landmark regions like the temporal squama or the occipital protuberance — and use those features to inform the reconstruction.