WHEN the makers of a new BBC documentary about Neanderthals wanted help to show how our ancient ancestors walked and talked they turned to motion capture technology and to the world’s foremost exponent of it – Hollywood actor Andy Serkis. But before Serkis could bring the male Neanderthal to life, presenter and paleontologist Ella Al-Shamahi needed to know exactly what he might have looked like. For that she headed to Dundee University’s acclaimed Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification and its expert Dr Christopher Rynn.

Rynn, who spent part of his training working with the FBI at its Virginia headquarters, is more used to dealing with the recent victims of violent crime. But using a cast of a Neanderthal skull which Al-Shamahi christened Ned, Dr Rynn used all the techniques at his disposal to recreate the face of a man who died tens of thousands of years ago in what is now Northern Iraq. What he discovered radically altered the way Serkis approached the job of becoming Ned - and gave the world new insight into the fact that far from being savages, Neanderthals cared for their sick and disabled.

The latest episode of Neanderthals: Meet The Ancestors airs tonight and shows Serkis and his team coming to grips with the information Rynn provided. What Rynn noticed as he was reconstructing the face was an asymmetry to the skull that couldn’t be natural. He thought at first it was caused by post-mortem pressure – the skull had lain under mounds of earth for millennia until its discovery in the late 1950s – but when he read the anthropologists’ report, currently lodged at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, he saw mention of healed trauma. He concluded that Ned couldn’t move well at all. Which obviously made walking and running something of a problem.

“The guy got a massive head injury on the left side at quite a young age which might have made him blind in the left eye and deaf in the left ear and semi-paralysed down the right side,” says Dr Rynn. “So his right arm and leg were quite withered. And there was a broken right foot so he probably had a limp. But he lived another 20 years so his family took care of him. He couldn’t have survived on his own so this is the first proper evidence that Neanderthals properly cared for each other like that.”

Ned isn’t Dr Rynn’s first brush with history. Last year he made headlines when he recreated the face of 18th century Scot Lilias Adie. Sentenced to death for witchcraft in Fife in 1704, she died before sentence could be carried out so was buried rather than burnt alive. “When a body is in a fire and it heats past a certain temperature the air in the sinuses in the face expands and the head essentially explodes and the face is ruined,” Dr Rynn explains. “There’s no skull left to do a facial recognition from”. But here was the skeleton of a woman accused of witchcraft which had the head intact. So here, potentially, was the face of a “witch”.

Water is the other element most detrimental to identification and it’s one that Scotland has an abundance of. Much of Dr Rynn’s forensic casework involves helping identify bodies which have been immersed in lochs or rivers, or which have been pulled from the sea after accidents on board fishing boats. In 2014 he worked to identify the body of a man washed up near the Skye Bridge. Other successful cases he has worked on include the murder of Aivaras Danilevicius, whose body was discovered in Berkshire in 2015 but who was only identified after a computer-generated image created by Dr Rynn was circulated in his home country of Lithuania.

“There is quite a lot of tragedy,” Dr Rynn admits. “But you just have to find the clinical professional switch and flick it and be as objective as possible. The less you know about the case the better in some senses. But also if anything’s found at the scene that can tell us about how the person looked we can add that to the image. So you need one type of information but you don’t need the back story – though that’s the thing everyone wants to talk about.”

That’s certainly true for Ned the Neanderthal.