A smooth, round hole in the shoulder blade of a Neanderthal who died more than 70,000 years ago may be the oldest evidence yet of a human ancestor killed by a wooden spear.
Archaeologists spotted the distinctive injury after excavating the skeletal remains of the adult and other Neanderthals beneath nearly 8 meters of rock and sediment in Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan.
At least five Neanderthals were buried in the same place for several years, in a depression no bigger than a refrigerator that lay behind a huge boulder near the cave entrance. Some bodies appear to have been placed on top of others that were still decomposing.
“They come back to the same location to place the bodies over many years or decades and that’s really quite unusual in the Neanderthal archaeological record,” said Dr Emma Pomeroy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge. “This suggests that there is some sort of significant behavior in placing the dead there.”
Researchers found only partial remains of the injured Neanderthal, an adult around 45 years old. The left shoulder blade that bears the wound was found with seven teeth, several ribs and fragments, and an almost complete right hand resting against the rock.
Close inspection of the shoulder blade revealed three fractures extending from the 1.5 cm wide hole and bone fragments that filled the wound. The fragments were likely extracted from the thin bone when the spear struck, the scientists said.
The circular shape of the hole and the bone lesions strongly suggest a wound inflicted by a wooden spear striking the body from the front. But whether it was a hunting accident or an intentional attack – a brutal blow from an enemy, perhaps – is impossible to know.
Pomeroy said the position of the wound and the force required to push the spear through the chest, where it would have pierced the lung and likely severed the arteries before exiting the shoulder blade, indicated a “lethal shot” aimed at the heart. “I don’t think it’s something you do accidentally,” she said.
The spear wound was almost certainly fatal, but the individual was in poor condition before the fatal blow. Examination of the teeth revealed a lower incisor split vertically, leaving only half in place, with its neighbors twisted inward, according to details published in Scientific Reports.
“It would take a pretty hard blow to the face to break a tooth like that and rotate the others,” Pomeroy said. “They could very well have needed help because they would have suffered terribly.” The split tooth was covered in hardened plaque that would have taken at least a year to build up.
Chris Hunt, emeritus professor at Liverpool John Moores University, co-author of the paper, said Shanidar Neanderthals took ibex as their main prey and may have used wooden spears shaped like modern javelins to kill the animals.
Because plant matter decomposes so easily, very few wooden objects survive from prehistory, but wooden spears dating from around 200,000 years ago have been discovered in Germany, preserved in waterlogged soil. The pointed end of a rounded wooden spear discovered at Clacton-on-Sea in 1911 is the oldest known, more than 400,000 years old.
Last week, Spanish scientists described hundreds of footprints and wooden objects showing that Neanderthals enjoyed woodworking, making trays, plates, tripods, spears and other objects. But evidence of deadly skirmishes is harder to find in fossils: we may never know how the wounded Neanderthal at Shanidar died. “It’s possible it was a hunting accident,” Hunt said. “However, we cannot exclude that this was deliberate interpersonal violence.”
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