A hole punched through the shoulder blade of a Neanderthal who died 75,000 years ago may be the oldest known evidence that a sharpened wooden spear killed a member of the human family, according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports reported by the BBC and detailed in a University of Cambridge release.
The remains, known as Shanidar A, were recovered from Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, a site that has yielded at least ten Neanderthal skeletons since excavations began in the 1950s. The individual, an adult who died at around 45, was found with a nearly circular 15-millimetre hole through the left scapula, the flat bone that sits behind the shoulder.
Tracing the wound
Researchers led by Dr Emma Pomeroy of Cambridge's Department of Archaeology concluded that a spear most likely entered the front of the chest, tore through a lung and major blood vessels, and exited through the shoulder blade, killing the individual quickly. The team recovered tiny bone fragments displaced by the weapon and compared the wound's shape with holes produced experimentally by replica wooden spears, finding a close match. A stone- or flint-tipped weapon, by contrast, tends to leave a flatter, more angular opening.
Pomeroy told the BBC the strike may have been an intended heart shot, though she stressed that a hunting accident — a Neanderthal struck by a companion's spear during a close-range hunt — cannot be ruled out. Prof Graeme Barker of St John's College, Cambridge, who leads the Shanidar excavations, was more direct about the broader pattern, saying all anyone 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.
A deepening picture of violence
The find echoes an earlier discovery at the same cave, where a Neanderthal who died around 50,000 years ago had a partly healed rib wound attributed to a stone-tipped spear. Prof Chris Stringer of London's Natural History Museum, who was not involved in the new study, told the BBC an attack by a rival is the more plausible explanation for the Shanidar A wound, given its positioning and extent. He pointed to a 2022 study of Neanderthal skulls from northern Spain's Pit of Bones, which found dozens of healed and fatal head injuries clustered in the same spot across several individuals — evidence, researchers argued, of repeated deliberate violence roughly 430,000 years ago.
Together, the cases push back against the long-standing assumption that organised, lethal violence between humans began only with the rise of farming and settled life. Shanidar A also bore an older, survived injury: a split lower incisor with enough tartar build-up to suggest the individual lived with it for at least a year, probably cared for by others. The same patch of cave floor held a tight cluster of five Neanderthal burials, which researchers regard as evidence of deliberate, symbolic treatment of the dead — a reminder that violence and compassion coexisted deep in Neanderthal society.
