A Neanderthal who survived a split tooth likely died from a wooden spear, study suggests

About 75,000 years ago, a Neanderthal in their mid-40s took a blow to the mouth that split a front tooth in two. They kept living and eating for months, perhaps years, after. Then something, most likely a wooden spear, went through their chest and out of their left shoulder blade.

That is the reading of a new study of an individual called Shanidar A, published on 15 October in Scientific Reports. The Neanderthal spear wound is rare, indirect evidence of a wooden weapon, a tool that almost never survives. It also puts care and violence inside one life.

A round hole points to a wooden spear wound

A Cambridge-led team dug the bones out of Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2019 and 2022. Cambridge’s Emma Pomeroy led the 12-person UK and Spanish study. Little survives: most of a right hand, two ribs and a rib fragment, a left shoulder blade and seven teeth. The sex could not be worked out.

Shanidar A is the deepest of at least five Neanderthals in one small burial group. The 75,000-year date comes from earlier dating of that group, not from new tests on these bones.

The shoulder blade has a near-perfectly round hole about 15 mm across. The paper says a round hole fits a spear with a rounded shaft; a stone tip usually leaves an oval or angular hole. No healing, plus small bone pieces in the soil under the hole, point to an injury around the time of death.

Plaque later built up on the split tooth’s broken edge, and the tooth kept wearing down. 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.” That year is the team’s estimate.

Accident or attack, and whose hand, are still open

The paper says whether this was a hunting accident or violence between people “cannot be known”. Pomeroy notes that large animals may have been hunted up close with thrusting spears, so an accident is possible. Still, she says the wound’s position and the force needed “bear the hallmarks of an intended kill shot directed towards the heart.”

Who held the spear is open too. Cambridge calls another Neanderthal the most straightforward reading. Did modern humans kill Neanderthals here? No evidence points either way.

The university’s release says the find may be the earliest known deadly wooden spear attack in the human fossil record. The paper only says it adds to a small set of such wounds. Older violence exists. Skulls from Sima de los Huesos in Spain show deliberate killing about 430,000 years ago, weapon unknown. Shanidar 3, from this cave and about 25,000 years younger, has a rib wound that better fits a stone-tipped weapon.

Outside experts differ. “I think it’s a bit of a stretch with the justification they have so far,” Sofia Samper Carro of the Australian National University told ABC News. John McNabb, an emeritus professor of Palaeolithic archaeology at the University of Southampton, told CNN that a wound through the shoulder from the front supports deliberate violence. But, he added: “Murder? Attack from a rival Neanderthal group? We just do not know.”

What the Shanidar A Neanderthal says about us

Many people alive today carry a little Neanderthal DNA, because our ancestors and Neanderthals sometimes interbred. In a way, this is a family story.

It fits a pattern. Shanidar 1, found in the same cave in the 1950s, lived on with a withered arm, deafness and partial blindness. Neanderthal care for the injured keeps showing up. “We have a tendency to romanticise hunter-gatherer or pre-agriculture lifestyles as peaceful and close to the natural world … but it’s not that simple,” Pomeroy told ABC.

It is also a lesson in reading science news headlines: when you see “earliest” or “attack”, check whether the paper said it.

Strong on care, honest about the killing

On balance, this is careful, open-access work. The team lifted the shoulder blade in one piece and fitted the broken fragments back. Neanderthal wooden spears are so rarely preserved that the shape of a hole is valuable evidence.

The weak points are real. No weapon was found, so the case for a wooden spear rests on that round shape and on comparisons with replica-spear experiments. Force tests are still to come, and the release’s “attack” framing outruns the paper.

The likelier reading: a life with care in the middle and a violent end, with the “who” and “why” honestly unknown.

Next, the team plans experiments on how much force it takes to punch a hole like this. Until then, this Neanderthal spear wound is a strong clue, not a verdict.