Scientists recreate what a Neanderthal woman looked like 75,000 years ago

Neanderthals were quite different to us Homospaiens, but as you can see, they still look pretty similar!

75,000 years ago our ancient ancestors, the Neanderthals, walked the Earth - but what did they look like?

Well, it's not possible to go back in time, so scientists have done the next best thing and recreated what a Neanderthal woman would've looked like.

Neanderthals became extinct 40,000 years ago but their remains have been found across the world, with one recent discovery being used to create the sculpture.

Dr Emma Pomeroy, from the University of Cambridge, worked on the project and said they hope "she can connect us with who they were."

The sculpture was based on fragments of a skull found in Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan but they were "as flat as a pizza" according to one of the researchers.

The remains were also shattered into pieces and was as soft as a "well dunked biscuit".

Researchers first had to strengthen the fragments before reassembling them.

With permission of the local department of antiquities, the skull fragments were brought to the UK in blocks of sediment to begin the painstaking process of freeing them, stabilising them and then putting them back together.

The complicated jigsaw puzzle took more than a year to complete.

Dr Emma Pomeroy with the hardened skull fragments which took over a year to piece together

But after strengthening the fragments, paleoartists were able to create the 3D model

It's not the first time scientists have done something like this, a model of a Neanderthal man was made based on an excavated skeleton back in 2012 too.

The latest model appears in a new BBC documentary for Netflix called Secrets of the Neanderthals, which examines what we know about our long-lost evolutionary cousins.