A 75,000-year-old Neanderthal found in Iraqi Kurdistan was probably killed by a sharpened wooden spear that pierced his chest and exited through his shoulder blade, researchers at the University of Cambridge report. If they are right, it is the oldest evidence in the human fossil record of a fatal attack with a wooden spear.
What the team found
The remains, known as Shanidar A, come from Shanidar Cave, which sits in the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan. Excavated in 2020, they include a left shoulder blade, a nearly complete right hand, ribs and seven teeth from a man aged about 45. The shoulder blade has a round hole about 15 millimeters (0.6 inches) across.
The researchers reassembled displaced bone fragments and compared the hole with ones made by replica wooden spears. Their conclusion, published in Scientific Reports: the spear entered the front of the left chest, went through a lung and major blood vessels, and came out through the shoulder blade from behind, traveling downward from above. Death would have been rapid. The team suspects a deliberate “heart shot.”
The same man had older injuries. A split lower incisor and nearby teeth pushed inward point to a powerful blow to the face. Tartar buildup suggests he lived at least another year, which the authors link to care from others, such as softer food.
A burial, too
Shanidar A lay on his back, head pointing east, deepest in a space about 1.5 by 1 by 1 meters behind a large upright boulder. Four adults and an infant were found there, and some were placed before earlier bodies had fully decomposed, suggesting the spot was reused over years or decades. Lead author Emma Pomeroy said the best explanation is “intentional and symbolic funerary behavior.” Co-author Graeme Barker noted that evidence of systematic violence is “extremely rare in deep prehistory.”
The catch
The team can’t say exactly what happened or who threw the spear. An accident during close-range hunting of large animals, such as mammoths, is possible. The study also can’t show whether modern humans played any role. The researchers consider violence between Neanderthals the simplest explanation.
For context, wooden spears from Schöningen, Germany, are about 200,000 years old, and a spear tip from Clacton-on-Sea in England is more than 400,000 years old. Those show hunting weapons existed much earlier. What’s new here is a human body with a spear wound, tied to a deliberate burial.
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