From a peeling skull, found in flat pieces like a pizza on the floor of a cave in northern Iraq, the face of a woman has been reconstructed. 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman. Her name is Shanidar Z. She has a calm and thoughtful expression, she seems like a mature, thoughtful, approachable and even kind woman. The image of her is very far from the grumpy and brutish stereotype we had of Neanderthals, created in 1908 after the discovery of The Old Man of La Chapelle.
From the reconstruction of The Old Man, the first relatively complete skeleton of his species to be found, scientists made assumptions about the Neanderthal character that reached the general public. The skull of Neanderthals had a low, sunken forehead, a protruding jaw, and a frown. These traits represented, according to their hypotheses, brutality and low intelligence, typical of the “inferior races.”
These assumptions were the result of a then predominant concept in science: the skull and the racial hierarchy. Ideas that now have been discredited, in addition to being racist, because they have no foundation.
The idea of brute Neanderthals took hold in both the general public and science for decades. At the same time, by comparison, it extolled how far modern humans had come, the Homo sapiens.
Shanidar Z’s face
Shanidar Z’s facial reconstruction, based on research from the University of Cambridge, invites us to empathize and see Neanderthals as part of a broader human history. “I think it can help us connect with who they were,” explains paleoarchaeologist Emma Pomeroya member of the Cambridge team behind the research, in a new Netflix documentary, Secrets of the Neanderthals. The documentary delves into what the fossil record tells us about his life and disappearance.
The emotional reconstruction
But it was not paleoanthropologists who recreated Shanidar Z, but the well-known paleoartists Kennis and Kennis. They sculpted a modern human face, with sensitivity and a kind expression. This drive toward historical facial reconstruction, which invokes emotional connection, is increasingly common thanks to 3D technologies, and it will be even more so with generative AI.
As a historian of emotions and the human face, I can say that there is more art here than science. In fact, it is good art, but the story is questionable. Technologies like DNA testing, 3D scanners and CT scans help artists generate faces like Shanidar Z’s, creating a naturalistic and accessible way for us to “see” people from the past. But we should not underestimate the importance of subjective and creative interpretation, and how it feeds on contemporary assumptions.
Faces are as much a product of culture and environment as bone structure, and Shanidar Z’s is largely based on guesswork. It is true that we can affirm, for example, from the shape of the bones and thick eyebrows, that an individual had a pronounced forehead or other basic facial structures. But there is no scientific evidence of how that person’s muscles, nerves and facial fibers were superimposed on the skeletal remains.
Kennis and Kennis recognized this in 2018 in an interview about his practice granted to The Guardian. “There are some things the skull can’t tell you,” admits Adrie Kennis. “You never know how much fat someone had around their eyes, or the thickness of their lips, or the exact position and shape of their nostrils.”
Inventing the color of the skin, the lines on the forehead or the half smile requires an enormous work of imagination and creativity. The traits created for Shanidar Z suggest kindness, accessibility, closeness…, qualities that define modern emotional communication.
“If we have to do a reconstruction,” explains Adrie Kennis, “we always want it to be fascinating, not a boring white mannequin, like it just got out of the shower.”
The superposition of the skeletal remains from the current sensibility reaffirms the recent reinvention of the Neanderthals as humans just like usinstead of thugs armed with clubs.
Only 20 years ago it was discovered that modern humans carry Neanderthal genes, coinciding with the discovery of many similarities over differences. For example, funeral practices, care of the sick, and love for art.
This reimagining of Neanderthals is historically and politically interesting because it draws on contemporary ideas about race and identity. But also because it renews the popular narrative of human evolution, prioritizing creativity and compassion over disruption and extinction.
The forgotten history of the human face
Creativity and imagination are what determine the kind facial expression that makes Shanidar Z seem likeable and approachable.
We don’t know what kind of facial expressions they used or were meaningful to Neanderthals. Whether or not Neanderthals had the vocal range or hearing of modern humans It is a topic of debate and would have drastically influenced social communication through the face. None of this information can be deduced from a skull.
The facial surgeon Daniel Saleh He told me about the cultural relevance of Shanidar Z: “As we age, we get semilunar folds (wrinkles) around the dimple, which changes the face, but there is no correlation with the skeleton.” Since facial expressions such as smiling evolved with the need for social communication, Shanidar Z can be considered an example of overlapping contemporary ideas about the interaction of soft tissues with bones, rather than revealing a scientific method.
This matters because there is a long and problematic history of attributing emotions, intelligence, civility, and courage to some faces and not others. The way we represent, imagine and understand the faces of people past and present is a political and social activity.
emotional empathy
Historically, societies have provided greater emotional empathy to the faces of those with whom they wanted to relate. However, when cultures have determined certain groups that they do not want to connect with and, in fact, want to marginalize, grotesque and inhuman ideas and representations arise around them. Take, for example, anti-black cartoons of the Jim Crow era in the United States or the cartoons of the Jews carried out by the Nazis.
By depicting this 75,000-year-old woman as a contemplative, kind soul we can identify with, rather than a grumpy, angry (or blank-faced) creature, we are saying more about our need to rethink the past than about any concrete fact about the emotional life of Neanderthals.
There is nothing inherently wrong with artistically imagining the past, but we must be clear when we do it and why. Otherwise, we will be ignoring the complex power and meanings of the face in history and in the present.
Fay Bound Alberti is a cultural historian and writer, a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at King’s College London.
This article was originally published in The Conversation.
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