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For the first time, we can get a glimpse of the handsome common forefathers we shared with the Neanderthals.

It has been surmised that humans shared ancestors with the Neanderthals, but we never knew what they looked like, as there were no fossils from the Middle Pleistocene period.

"We know we share a common ancestor with Neanderthals, but what did it look like? And how do we know the rare fragments of fossil we find are truly from this past ancestral population? Many controversies in human evolution arise from these uncertainties," Aurélien Mounier, lead author of the study, said in a press release.

Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge have used digital "morphometrics" and statistical algorithms of cranial fossils spanning the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, in order to create a 3-D skull of our "last common ancestor" for the first time, according to HNGN.

The fossil samples offered landmarks to the researchers that created an "evolutionary framework" that helped them to predict the "skull structure timeline" of our ancestor, combining the information with a digital scan of a modern skull.

With the results, the scientists were able to assess the "morphology convergence between both species in the last common ancestor's skull during the Middle Pleistocene era", about 800 to 100 thousand years ago.

"We wanted to try an innovative solution to deal with the imperfections of the fossil record: a combination of 3D digital methods and statistical estimation techniques. This allowed us to predict mathematically and then recreate virtually skull fossils of the last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals, using a simple and consensual 'tree of life' for the genus Homo."

The study was published in Human Evolution.