75,000-year-old Neanderthal wound may be earliest evidence of wooden spear killing

A hole in a Neanderthal’s shoulder blade may be the earliest fossil evidence of a person killed with a sharpened wooden spear, according to researchers studying 75,000-year-old remains from Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Cambridge University-led team believes the weapon entered the chest from the front, passed through a lung and probably major arteries, then pierced the left shoulder blade, causing rapid death. The wound’s position suggests a possible deliberate strike towards the heart, although a hunting accident cannot be ruled out.

The remains, named Shanidar A after the cave where they were discovered, also bear evidence of a severe facial injury survived at least a year earlier. Researchers interpret that survival as evidence that the individual received care from other Neanderthals.

The findings, published in Scientific Reports, concern an adult estimated to have been about 45 when they died. Alongside the shoulder blade, archaeologists recovered a mostly complete right hand, two left ribs, a fragment of a right rib and seven teeth.

The scapula had survived almost intact beneath 7.5 metres, or 24.6 feet, of rock and sediment. Parts of the broad, flat bone are so thin that they become almost translucent when held up to the light.

Study lead author Dr Emma Pomeroy said: “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.

“We were able to lift it out in one piece from under almost eight metres of rock and sediment.”

Its only mark was a circular perforation 15 millimetres wide. The researchers say its shape is consistent with a sharpened wooden spear: a flint or stone tip would have left a flat or angular hole. Tiny fragments of bone displaced by the weapon suggest it entered from above, travelling downwards.

Wood rarely survives over such long periods, but earlier discoveries show that the technology existed well before Shanidar A’s death. Waterlogged spears found in Schöningen, Germany, in the 1990s date to around 200,000 years ago, when early Neanderthals inhabited Europe. Made from carefully selected timber, their weight distribution was suited to throwing, like modern javelins, and they were probably used to hunt game.

The earliest known rounded wooden spear is more than 400,000 years old. Only its pointed end survived; it was recovered from the shoreline at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, in 1911.

Pomeroy, a fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge, said experimental recreations of spears from the period produced holes that closely matched the Shanidar wound. She said Neanderthals and their ancestors had developed woodworking and weapon-making skills many thousands of years earlier, capabilities that could have extended across their homelands from Wales to Siberia.

Whether the fatal wound was deliberate remains unresolved. Pomeroy suggested that close-range hunting with thrusting spears could have resulted in an accident.

“Animals such as mammoths may have been hunted up close with thrusting spears, so it’s easy to imagine lethal injuries,” she said.

But she also identified evidence consistent with an intentional killing: “The position of the wound and the force required to push it right through the Neanderthal’s body bear the hallmarks of an intended kill shot directed towards the heart.”

The researchers say they cannot establish the circumstances or whether modern humans were involved. They regard the wound as a possible earliest example of lethal interpersonal violence involving a sharpened wooden spear in the fossil record.

Professor Graeme Barker, who leads the Shanidar Cave excavations, said: “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.”

He said evidence of systematic violence was extremely rare in deep prehistory, with the vast majority coming from settled farming communities thousands of years later than Neanderthal hunter-gatherer societies.

The teeth reveal a separate episode of serious injury. An incisor at the front of the lower jaw had split lengthways, leaving only half the tooth, while neighbouring teeth had rotated inwards. Substantial tartar along the exposed root canal suggests the damaged tooth remained in place for some time after what researchers identify as major blunt-force trauma to the face.

Pomeroy said: “Surviving a blow that splits a tooth in this fashion, then continuing to live and eat for a period of at least a year and maybe more, would have required care and support from other Neanderthals.”

She said Shanidar A would have experienced prolonged agony and difficulty communicating, and may initially have been fed soft food. Earlier research on sediment from the cave found that plant foods were being soaked before cooking around the same period.

Barker said: “It is fascinating to have evidence for both compassion and violence amongst Neanderthals, our closest evolutionary cousins, embodied in this one individual.”

Shanidar A was unearthed in 2020 directly behind a large upright boulder, close to other Neanderthal remains. Pomeroy said the group repeatedly returned to the same place to lay their dead to rest, sometimes before an earlier body had fully decomposed, indicating intervals of years or decades.