Astonishing images show how female Neanderthal may have looked

MEET Shanidar Z, one of the most important Neanderthal discoveries in a generation. Her remains, thought to date back 75,000 years, were fully unearthed five years ago in a re-excavation of a legendary archaeological site, Shanidar cave, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

She appears to have been deliberately interred along with a cluster of nine other Neanderthal men, women and children, whose skeletons were uncovered from the 1950s onwards and transformed our…