Neanderthal Killed by a Sharpened Wooden Spear 75,000 Years Ago May Be the Earliest Known Spear Murder
A round hole in a shoulder blade from Iraq's Shanidar Cave points to a thrust through the chest, and a split tooth shows the same person had been cared for earlier.
A Neanderthal who died about 75,000 years ago in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan may have been killed by a sharpened wooden spear, which would make it the earliest known evidence of a lethal wooden spear attack on a human ancestor. The finding comes from researchers at the University of Cambridge led by Dr. Emma Pomeroy and appears in Scientific Reports.
The individual, called Shanidar A, was unearthed in 2020 at Shanidar Cave. The remains include a left shoulder blade, a mostly complete right hand, two left ribs and a right-rib fragment, and seven teeth. The person was an adult, probably about 45 years old at death. The bones lay under roughly 7.5 meters, or 25 feet, of rock and sediment, and the team lifted the scapula out in one piece.
The shoulder blade carries a circular hole about 15 millimeters wide. Pomeroy's team argues that a stone or flint point would leave a flat or angular opening, so a round puncture points to a sharpened wooden spear. The damage suggests the weapon entered the left chest from the front, passed through the lung and probably major arteries, and exited through the scapula, causing rapid death. Beveling around the hole marks the exit wound, and displaced bone fragments suggest a downward path. The researchers think the strike may have been aimed at the heart, though they cannot confirm intent, and a hunting accident remains possible.
The same skeleton tells an earlier story. One lower incisor had split lengthwise, and neighboring teeth were rotated inward. Tartar on the exposed root suggests the damaged tooth stayed in the mouth for a long time, possibly a year or more. Pomeroy argues the person would have needed soft food and support from others to survive that long, would have had difficulty communicating, and was likely in severe pain for an extended period.
Wooden spears this old are rare because wood rarely survives. Spears from Schöningen, Germany, dating to about 200,000 years ago, were preserved in waterlogged ground and measure more than two meters long. The pointed tip of a wooden spear found at Clacton-on-Sea in the United Kingdom in 1911 is more than 400,000 years old. If the Shanidar A reading holds, it would be the earliest direct evidence of such a weapon being used to kill a hominin, and possibly the first sign of sharpened wooden spears in the prehistoric Middle East.
The body also lay among others. Ralph Solecki's excavations in the 1950s found 10 individuals at Shanidar. Since 2015, the Cambridge-led team under Professor Graeme Barker of St. John's College has found three more Neanderthals in a burial cluster, bringing the total there to five, four adults and an infant. Shanidar A is the deepest in the cluster and was laid on its back with its head facing east. Some bodies were placed before earlier ones had fully decomposed, so the burials may span only years or decades. Pomeroy calls "intentional and symbolic funerary behavior" the best explanation.
The authors are cautious. The context of the violence is unknown, and the study cannot say whether modern humans were involved. They consider violence between Neanderthals the most straightforward reading.
