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The Shanidar Cave
is regarded as one of the most revered caves in the world
during the time of the Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens.
In a place where life has been ever present,
we might find answers to questions.
Questions that are still mysterious.
At that time,
we were young.
I was approximately...
seventeen, eighteen years old.
The doctor taught us.
Many stones came out of the cave, large stones.
They used explosives.
They found the Neanderthal skeletons. It was a big deal.
Their ribs and bones were thick.
Their head was very large.
Their hands,
everything about them was striking.
We call it the tree of life.
Each human and each animal
becomes a branch on that tree of life.
We are one of the branches, and the Neanderthals were another.
Somewhere along the line, we separated.
I truly feel
that I am sitting on my cousin's remains.
Every new evidence, that you have about Neanderthals,
is actually showing you how human they are.
But their behavior was different from ours.
They lived in a completely different world to our world.
This is part of the Krapina Collection.
They are around 130,000 years old,
and they are the biggest collection of Neanderthals coming from a single site.
We are estimating possibly up to around 80 individual Neanderthals.
You don't have their whole bodies buried.
You actually have just fragments of each of those individuals.
So that is very unusual.
On the Krapina bones, both cranial, so skull bones, and also postcranial,
you see a lot of human-made cut marks.
What this is is a tibia, and there is a possibility
that it was broken on purpose, that it was smashed.
You can also see cut marks here and even some other marks.
One of the reasons you would maybe smash a long bone
is because it's like a container of bone marrow.
This is a fibula that has another interesting kind of marking
on the surface of the bone.
They were probably made when someone was scraping off
the remaining flesh of the bone or remaining muscle tissue of the bone.
As you would do
when you were just like doing the same with your chicken bone at your lunch.
When you hear they were eating each other, you're immediately, like, shocked.
But it's also the question, "What kind of cannibalism?"
What did it mean to them?
Recreating the tools, the ways to do stuff,
we are trying to go into the head of those people,
and, you know, see the cognitive processes that go behind.
So, what is different is that we're just getting cut marks
close to the articulation sites.
And what is weird in the human remains in Krapina is
that you are getting it all along the long bones.
So as if someone is actually scraping it continuously.
I cannot imagine, like, doing this to someone I actually know.
So, this is the famous Krapina 3 skull.
It is the most complete cranial specimen
in the whole collection, and it's the only one that has a face.
This person, we believe, was a female.
A young Neanderthal in her 20s.
What is very interesting is that on the frontal bone,
you have a series of something like 40 cut marks.
There is determination
to do 40 cut marks slowly and very close together.
Even if they were consuming these bones,
I don't think it was because they were starving.
It's actually deeply complex behavior.
Maybe by consuming the flesh of the person they knew,
they want to get some kind of virtue, something that they admired in this person
that they shared their lives with.
In the ethnographic examples that we know of,
until recently, people consumed their loved ones
because by consuming their flesh, they're trying to take in something
that can continue on to other generations, you know, it's some kind of legacy.
I cannot say that this was exactly what was the driving force
behind this kind of behavior in Neanderthals,
but it's another possibility.
After cleaning and strengthening the bones,
then I had the pieces,
and I could start to do the restoration, which is a big jigsaw.
So, the first fragment is like the easy part.
And then it gets more complicated.
You need patience,
because you have a very unique specimen in your hands.
It's a lot of responsibility.
Here we have the skull that Emma, the data Emma, sent us.
We've got an almost complete skull, nice complete skull, and it's printed out.
- So now we can see him. - Wow.
Who are the Kennis brothers?
The Kennis brothers are two twins who are fascinated by human evolution.
Let's see, look at this nose.
It looks a very Neanderthal-like nose, but what we see is
that the other side of the nose is very narrow.
We reconstruct ancient extinct humans.
We try to show people
how maybe the early ancestors would look like in real life.
- Big eyes, tall face, small nose. - Big eye, yeah.
You know, like... spectacles, you know, these enormous, big spectacles like...
If you put the mandible below it, it looks like... uh...
We were very bad at school.
We didn't read much.
We went to the library, and we saw some beautiful pictures of Neanderthals.
We see immediately those worn-down teeth, mamma mia!
- Incredible teeth. - Typical Neanderthal.
- They use their teeth like a vice. Yeah. - Vice. Like a tool.
That, we find fascinating.
How a face, an ape face, could morph into a human face.
For us, what's fascinating about Neanderthals is,
they've got an enormous, big nose,
an enormous puffy face.
Never in human evolution did you see such a big, strange face.
So that's fantastic to see.
So, mostly we get skulls. Mostly the skulls are distorted.
We're gonna correct the skulls.
We're going to make them complete with forensic methods.
When the skull is complete, then we apply the tissue thickness,
the muscles on it and the flesh.
We fill it up with a kind of skin layer.
Yeah, you can come.
I hope that a lot of people look at this face
and maybe look at how strange it is.
They had such peculiar features.
And that's so striking because the brain size is same as us.
They are as human as us, but still there are differences,
and that's fascinating, why are they different?
It's such a kind of parallel evolution with us.
- All right. - Yeah, all right. Okay.
And why did one disappear, and why is one still alive?
That's fascinating. That's the other us.
It is really unnatural to go into the caves.
These are places that people fear.
And especially to the very bottom of the caves.
It's very constructed.
We understood that there were architectural tricks.
Small elements to wedge the large stalagmites.
All of this is completely structured and thought out.
For an archaeologist, it's quite unique. There is no other equivalent to it.
Here we have a thermal alteration, but it's not the only one.
We have quite a few...
- Here we agree, that's the hearth. - It's the hearth.
It's the hearth.
So we have several places here where a fire was present at some point.
Number 38,
along the middle.
This is very exciting because we can see traces of soot,
thermal alterations.
There is very black soot, it's red, it's purple.
Obviously, in all traditional or prehistoric populations,
we know that fire has a symbolic value.
One hundred seventy-five thousand years ago in Europe,
there were only Neanderthals.
Bruniquel is the oldest construction in the world that you can see.
The recurring question that keeps coming back is,
"What are the structures for?"
So more and more, we tend to see in Neanderthals
a much older humanity,
which shares with modern man more and more things in common.
And therefore with Bruniquel,
we increased this relationship we have with an ancestor who is very old.
Neanderthal genes are present inside many Homo Sapiens.
And I do really believe that we are cousins.
We are of the same blood.
We have the same ancestors.