A wooden spear through the chest likely killed a Neanderthal 75,000 years ago

A perfectly round hole in a Neanderthal’s shoulder blade is the exit wound of a wooden spear that went in through the chest. The bone belongs to an older adult laid to rest in Shanidar Cave, in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, and its edges show no trace of healing: this person died with the wound, or soon after receiving it.

The same individual had already survived a different catastrophe. A lower front tooth, split in half by a heavy blow to the face, stayed in the mouth long enough to be coated in tartar and polished by chewing. The injured Neanderthal went on eating for a long time with a broken, painful mouth, and one partial skeleton now carries both a violent death and the marks of a life that others probably helped sustain.

The individual, known as Shanidar A, lived around 75,000 years ago and was about 45 at death, judging by how heavily the front teeth were worn. A team led by Emma Pomeroy of the University of Cambridge, with archaeologist Graeme Barker and colleagues in the UK and Spain, describes the remains in the journal Scientific Reports. The bones recovered cannot reveal the person’s sex.

Pomeroy reads the wound as deliberate. “The position of the wound and the force required to push it right through the Neanderthal’s body bear the hallmarks of an intended kill shot directed towards the heart,” she said in a statement from the University of Cambridge. Barker is more guarded: “All we 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.”

How they read a 75,000-year-old wound

The shoulder blade had softened in damp cave sediment. The team hardened it in place with a conservation resin and lifted it together with the block of earth beneath it, a decision that preserved the key evidence.

Micro-CT scans of the block, a high-resolution X-ray method that sees inside without digging, revealed at least four bone fragments, each at least 4 millimeters long, directly under the hole. One fits back into the hole exactly, confirmed by a ridge of muscle attachment that continues from the shoulder blade onto the fragment. The pieces had been driven out of the bone into the soft tissue that once covered it, which only happens while the body is intact.

The CT data showed no burrows or plant roots of matching diameter, and the edges of the hole carry the same mineral staining as the rest of the bone, so the damage is ancient. Under the microscope the margins show no new bone growth, the signature of healing. The injury happened at or around the time of death.

The shape points to the weapon. The hole measures about 15 millimeters across, roughly the width of a fingertip, with a near-perfect circular outline and at least three cracks radiating from it. In stabbing experiments on animal carcasses with replica Paleolithic weapons, stone-tipped spears tend to leave diamond- or lozenge-shaped holes, while rounded wooden points leave circular ones. The bone is also bevelled on its back face, the side where a weapon exits.

A spear through the chest

The authors reconstruct a spear that entered the left side of the body while the individual was facing forward, crossed the chest and punched out through the shoulder blade. Such a wound would have pierced the lungs and possibly major blood vessels, in the paper’s words “likely leading to a rapid death.”

Bruno Maureille, an anthropologist at the University of Bordeaux who was not involved in the study, told Science News the wound was made by a wooden spear “absolutely, without any question.”

Why this hole is so rare

Neanderthal skeletons are full of injuries, but almost all of them healed, and researchers link most to accidents, probably from hunting large animals at close range. Possible evidence of one hominin wounding another is far scarcer. The paper lists only a handful of cases across the Middle and Late Pleistocene, among them skull fractures in the pre-Neanderthals of Sima de los Huesos in northern Spain, roughly 430,000 years old, and the Qafzeh 25 skeleton, an early modern human from Israel.

Shanidar already held one. A Neanderthal man known as Shanidar 3, who died around 50,000 years ago, has a deep cut in a rib that researchers once proposed came from a stone-tipped weapon, possibly thrown by a modern human. Shanidar A is roughly 25,000 years older, and Pomeroy told Live Science the pairing may be coincidence: “We know from the archaeology that Neanderthals were repeatedly coming back to Shanidar and using it for short periods at a time, both around 75,000 years ago and around 45-50,000 years ago, as well as leaving their dead there.”

The wound also says something about tools. Wood almost never survives this long, so wooden weapons are known from very few sites, such as the spears of Schöningen in Germany, about 300,000 years old, and throwing sticks around 130,000 years old from Poggetti Vecchi in Italy. Shanidar preserves nothing wooden beyond pollen and charcoal, so a round hole in a bone is, as the authors put it, indirect evidence that its occupants used wooden spears too.

A broken tooth and a group that cared

Six lower front teeth survive, all worn in an unusual pattern. One incisor was split lengthwise, losing half its crown. Tartar later grew over the broken surfaces, and chewing wore a polish through that tartar, two slow processes. The blow also seems to have twisted the neighbouring teeth, consistent with a hard hit to the front of the jaw from a fall or from violence.

“There’s no doubt that Shanidar A would have had difficulty communicating and been in absolute agony for a long period of time,” 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.”

The burial points the same way. Shanidar A lay at the bottom of a tight cluster of Neanderthal dead, packed into a space about 1.5 meters long and a meter wide and deep behind a large boulder fallen from the cave roof. The find raises the minimum count in that cluster to five individuals, placed there on separate occasions, probably within living memory of one another. The authors argue that returning the dead again and again to one marked place is hard to explain without intention.

What the bones cannot tell us

Nobody can say who or what held the spear. The authors write that whether the wound came from a hunting accident or from interpersonal violence “cannot be known.” Rebecca Wragg Sykes, archaeologist and author of the book Kindred, who was not involved, told Live Science that “it would be interesting to also compare whether a wild goat horn, the most intensely hunted species at Shanidar, might have been responsible.”

The remains are also partial: a right hand, three ribs, the left shoulder blade and seven teeth, one of which probably belongs to someone else. There is no skull and no pelvis, and a later flash flood disturbed the grave. The team assigns the bones to one person because nothing is duplicated and the pieces lay in a consistent position, but the paper acknowledges they could come from more than one individual. The weapon identification also rests on comparison with experiments rather than a point found in the bone, and the authors are now testing whether slower, low-energy forces could produce the same features.

Common questions about the Shanidar Neanderthal

Did Neanderthals use wooden spears?

Yes. Wooden spears from Schöningen in Germany, about 300,000 years old, show that early humans in Europe shaped weapons from wood. A circular wound like this one is indirect evidence of the same technology much later and much farther east.

How can archaeologists tell a spear wound from other damage?

They look for bone that broke while the body was fresh, with no healing, and rule out roots, burrowing animals and excavation tools. The outline matters: in experiments, stone points tend to leave diamond-shaped holes and rounded wooden points leave circular ones.

Did Neanderthals care for injured group members?

Shanidar A lived for at least a year after a blow that split a tooth, and the researchers argue that this recovery would have required support from others.

Where is Shanidar Cave?

Shanidar Cave lies in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, in northern Iraq. Ralph Solecki’s excavations made it one of the best-known Neanderthal sites, and new digs have added individuals known as Shanidar Z, A and B.

Shanidar A was excavated in 2019 and 2022, during new fieldwork at the cave that began in 2015, and the study was published on October 15, 2026. Next, the team plans to examine the Neanderthal remains Solecki excavated in 1960, now held at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, to test whether some old and new bones belong to the same individuals.

Reference: Pomeroy et al., “Evidence for funerary behaviour and lethal trauma in a new Neanderthal individual from Shanidar Cave,” Scientific Reports, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-69193-z

Tags: archaeology, human evolution, Iraq, Neanderthals, Scientific Reports, Shanidar Cave