Neanderthals built shelters, carved clubs, and may have killed each other with wooden spears

A 75,000-year-old shoulder blade pulled from a cave in Iraqi Kurdistan has a 15-millimetre circular hole punched clean through it. Cambridge archaeologists who excavated the bone say the shape of the perforation — round, with bevelling consistent with an exit wound — points to a sharpened wooden spear driven through the left chest of a Neanderthal from above and in front, piercing lung and likely major arteries. The strike, they argue, may have been aimed at the heart. The Neanderthal, known to researchers as Shanidar A and estimated to have been around 45 years old, died rapidly.

Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the finding arrives alongside a separate study in Science Advances cataloguing 597 wooden remains — including spears, a carved club, bark trays, and structural poles — from a rock shelter in Spain. Together, the two papers make the same broad argument: wood was not a marginal material for Neanderthals. It was central to how they hunted, ate, slept, and, possibly, how they killed one another.

All we can ever know about the end of this Neanderthal's life is that it was violent, and came at the end of a wooden spear.— Prof Graeme Barker, fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, who leads the Shanidar Cave excavations

The Shanidar Cave bone was preserved almost intact under seven and a half metres of rock and sediment. Tiny shards of bone displaced by the weapon were still present, and their position indicated a downward trajectory — consistent with a thrust from above rather than a projectile fired from a distance. Researchers were able to partially reconstruct the hole using those fragments, guided by faint ridges where muscle had marked the bone.

It's extraordinary to have a perfectly preserved scapula from 75,000 years ago. These bones are so thin that you often don't get complete scapulae from modern burials.— Dr Emma Pomeroy, study lead author, Department of Archaeology, Cambridge

A stone or flint spear tip would leave a flat or angular hole; the round perforation in Shanidar A's scapula is consistent with sharpened wood. Pomeroy's team tested replicas of spears from the same era — including waterlogged examples recovered from Schöningen, Germany, in the 1990s, dated to around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago — and found the holes they produced matched the wound closely.

Holes left by recreations of spears from this time are an excellent fit for the one we found in the Neanderthal scapula. That early technology absolutely works for this wound.— Dr Emma Pomeroy, study lead author, Department of Archaeology, Cambridge

The researchers are careful not to call it murder. Pomeroy notes that Neanderthals may have hunted large animals such as mammoths at close range with thrusting spears, making lethal accidents plausible. But she says the position of the wound and the force required to drive a spear entirely through a body carry the hallmarks of an intended kill shot. The most straightforward interpretation, the team writes, is interpersonal violence between Neanderthals, though they acknowledge modern humans cannot be entirely ruled out.

Shanidar A's remains also tell a story of survival before the fatal blow. One lower incisor had been split lengthways, with significant tartar build-up along the exposed root canal — evidence the tooth stayed in the mouth for a year or more after what researchers describe as major blunt-force trauma to the face. Pomeroy says surviving such an injury, then continuing to live and eat, would have required care from other Neanderthals. Previous research on sediment in Shanidar Cave shows plant foods were being soaked before cooking around the same period, raising the possibility that Shanidar A was fed soft food during recovery.

The Spanish study, centred on Abric Romaní — a rock shelter at the foot of a travertine cliff near Capellades, west of Barcelona — offers a different kind of window into Neanderthal woodworking. Calcium-rich spring water dripping across the shelter floor coated everything on the ground in calcium carbonate: logs, pine cones, leaves, and tools. When the wood inside rotted away, it left hollow moulds that preserve the original shape in fine detail, sometimes down to the outlines of individual wood cells visible under a microscope.

A team of Spanish archaeologists catalogued 597 such remains from layers dated between 62,000 and 40,000 years ago — a span of roughly 20,000 years of Neanderthal occupation. Most turned out to be natural trunks, branches, and firewood, predominantly Scots pine. But 13 objects showed clear signs of human modification.

The morphology of these 13 tools is impossible to find in nature.— M. Gema Chacón, archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) and co-author of the study

Among the 13: four shallow trays made of juniper bark, the largest measuring 55 by 20 centimetres, found near hearths and possibly used to carry food or scoop embers. Two spears and a pointed stick were found close to the antlered skulls of red deer; the best-preserved spear is 2.45 metres long, and a cast of its tip shows an impact fracture consistent with striking bone — the same kind of damage seen on spears used by Aboriginal Australians. A branchless pole more than five metres long, found in the innermost part of the shelter, is thought to have leaned against the back wall to form a windbreak or simple hut; experiments confirmed that five metres is roughly the length such a structure requires.

The most unusual object is a club carved from a single piece of wood, with a 16-centimetre handle and a pointed, roughly triangular head about 14 centimetres tall. An abrupt right-angle step where handle meets head may have prevented the hand from slipping during use. According to Chacón, nothing quite like it has been found anywhere else. The only earlier object hypothesised to be a club comes from Kalambo Falls in Zambia and is roughly 400,000 years old.

We have a sample of wooden tools for different subsistence activities, not only hunting.— M. Gema Chacón, archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) and co-author of the study

The layout of the shelter itself suggests organised domestic life. Along the back wall, Neanderthals maintained a row of small hearths — roughly 50 centimetres across and spaced about a metre apart — with almost no debris around them. Chacón interprets these as sleeping hearths, providing warmth, light, and protection from predators. The shelter's busier end contained large, overlapping hearths surrounded by animal bones, stone-knapping debris, and firewood — the apparent area for food preparation, toolmaking, and communal eating.

Taken together, the two studies push back against a long-standing image of Neanderthals as cognitively limited relatives of modern humans. The Abric Romaní record shows woodworking was not occasional but routine, repeated across level after level over millennia. The Shanidar wound, if correctly interpreted, places wooden spear technology at the centre of both Neanderthal hunting and, possibly, Neanderthal conflict — across a range that Pomeroy says could have spanned from Wales to Siberia.

What evidence we have suggests that Neanderthals and their ancestors developed woodworking and weapon-making skills many thousands of years before the death of Shanidar A. This package of capabilities could have spanned the full range of Neanderthal homelands, from Wales to Siberia.— Dr Emma Pomeroy, study lead author, Department of Archaeology, Cambridge

The reason we know so little about any of this is straightforward: wood rots. The Schöningen spears survived in waterlogged sediment where low oxygen slowed decay. Abric Romaní's tools survived because mineral-rich water turned them to stone moulds before they could disappear. Shanidar A's scapula survived because it was buried under nearly eight metres of rock. Each preservation is an accident. The archaeology that remains almost certainly represents a fraction of a much larger wooden world.

Why it matters — Wood almost never survives from deep prehistory, so two rare preservation events — one in Spain, one in Iraq — are simultaneously rewriting what Neanderthals were capable of, from domestic architecture to lethal violence.

Reported by newscientist.com, arstechnica.com, cam.ac.uk