A 40-something woman was buried in a cave 75,000 years ago, laid to rest in a gully hollowed out to accommodate her body.
Her left hand was curled under her head, and a rock behind her head may have been placed as a cushion.
Known as Shanidar Z, after the cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where she was found in 2018, the woman was a Neanderthal, a type of ancient human that disappeared around 40,000 years ago.
Scientists studying her remains have painstakingly pieced together her skull from 200 bone fragments, a process that took nine months.
They used the contours of the face and skull to guide a reconstruction to understand what she may have …