The face of an eight-year-old Neanderthal boy who died more than 30,000 years ago has been reconstructed by scientists using a skull originally found in Teshik-Tash Cave in Uzbekistan in 1938.
The portrait is the first three-dimensional restoration of a Neanderthal skull fossil, showing the boy had a small snub nose sunken into his face.
The fossil is the first Neanderthal fossil discovered in Asia and the only complete Asian Neanderthal skull fossil to date.
The team, led by China’s Jilin University and Russia’s Moscow State University, believe the restoration reveals the facial shape of prehistoric humans in Eurasia and the morphological features of Neanderthals in Central Asia.
The portrait reveals that the boy had a small, upturned nose that was sunken into his face
The skull, named Teshik-Tash 1, was found in a shallow pit in the cave, along with five pairs of Siberian ibex horn cores and bird skeletons.
And this suggests that he was ritually buried.
But it was not until 2021 that the boy was identified as a Neanderthal by researchers at the Max Planck Institute.
The team analyzed the frontal bone of the skull and found that the shape matched that of previous Neanderthal skulls.
And DNA analysis showed that Teshik-Tash 1 carried Neanderthal-type mtDNA.
By an estimated age of eight, the child was physically mature enough to exhibit distinctive Neanderthal features, such as a large face and nose, a long, low skull, a chinless lower jaw, and a maturing eyebrow crest.
The original skull was reconstructed from about 150 fragments.
The team uploaded a scan of the skull and filled in the missing pieces, allowing them to overlay digital muscles and skin and finish with the boy’s facial features.
“Fossils of Neanderthal man, an extinct relative of modern humans, were first discovered in the Neanderthal Valley in Germany and were once widespread across Eurasia,” Zhang Quanchao, head of the team at Jilin University, told Xinhua.
It was long thought that Neanderthals only roamed the landscapes of Europe during the last Ice Age, but a study conducted by the University of Washington in 2015 found they may have spread further east and lived there alongside modern humans for longer than previously thought to have.
Analysis of traces of Neanderthal DNA found in the genome of modern humans has shown that people in East Asia carry between 15 and 30 percent more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans.
Joshua Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington, and his colleague Benjamin Vernot analyzed distinctive patterns in the DNA of 379 modern Europeans and 286 modern East Asians from China and Japan.
The skull was originally found in Teshik Tash Cave in Uzbekistan in 1938, and it wasn’t until 2012 that the boy was confirmed to be a Neanderthal
The team uploaded a scan of the skull and filled in the missing parts. The skull was found in parts, but scientists put it back together
Using computer models, they attempted to simulate how the mixtures of Neanderthal DNA seen in the European and East Asian genomes might have come about
They concluded that one theory — that modern Europeans interbred more with populations from Africa to dilute the Neanderthal DNA they carried — was unlikely.
Instead, they found that ancestors of East Asian populations were more likely to have mated with Neanderthals more than once.
After assembling the skull using the technology, the team was able to overlay digital muscle and skin
“One thing that complicates these analyzes is the fact that humans have constantly migrated throughout their history — making it difficult to say exactly where interactions with Neanderthals took place,” Vernot said.
“It is possible, for example, that all interbreeding with Neanderthals in the Middle East occurred before the ancestors of modern non-Africans spread across Eurasia.
“In the paper model, the ancestors of all non-Africans interbred with Neanderthals and then split into several groups that later became Europeans and East Asians.
The skull was also the easternmost extent of hominin discoveries outside of the Levant. The team believes the restoration reflects the facial shape of prehistoric humans in Eurasia and the morphological features of Neanderthals in Central Asia
“Shortly after they separated, the ancestors of East Asians interbred with Neanderthals a little more.
“What’s important is that we show that we haven’t encountered Neanderthals just once in our history – it appears we’ve encountered them multiple times.
“But as we can look at individuals from more and more populations, hopefully we’ll get a better idea of where our ancestors were and where they might have interacted with Neanderthals.”