Shanidar A's shoulder-blade hole fits a wooden spear, Cambridge researchers say

The team worked by elimination. It first excluded the usual ways a cave bone gets a hole after death, which are animal gnawing and insect burrowing ^[2]. It then compared the hole with experimental evidence of wounds from wooden spears and from stone-tipped weapons, and the shape matched wood ^[3]. A tip of flint or stone, the Cambridge archaeologists say, would leave a flat or angular hole ^[4]. Lead author Emma Pomeroy said: "Holes left by recreations of spears from this time are an excellent fit for the one we found in the Neanderthal scapula" ^[5].

Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an archaeologist who was not involved in the study, called a wooden spear plausible and then raised another pointed object. She said "it would be interesting to also compare whether a wild goat horn, the most intensely hunted species at Shanidar, might have been responsible" ^[13]. No trace of a spear survives in the cave, which is unremarkable given how easily wood decomposes ^[9].

Intent is a separate question, and the paper answers it more cautiously than the press statement does. The researchers wrote: "Whether the traumatic lesion on the scapula resulted from something like a hunting accident or from interpersonal violence cannot be known" ^[16]. Pomeroy, in the statement, said: "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" ^[15]. She also allowed the other reading: "Animals such as mammoths may have been hunted up close with thrusting spears, so it's easy to imagine lethal injuries" ^[17]. Co-author Graeme Barker said: "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" ^[18]. Phys.org reported that archaeologists believe the most straightforward interpretation is interpersonal violence between Neanderthals ^[19].

The bone cannot identify who held the spear. The sample is one individual. The entry path adds a wrinkle: the researchers wrote that the spear entered the left side while the person faced forward ^[8], while Phys.org described bone fragments that suggest a downward trajectory from above ^[7]. The accounts leave open whether that geometry bears on intent.

The "earliest" label depends on the intent reading. The oldest known rounded wooden spear, a pointed end pulled from the shoreline at Clacton-on-Sea in 1911, is over 400,000 years old ^[10]. That is at least 325,000 years before Shanidar A died ^[14]. What Shanidar A may be, according to Phys.org, is the earliest known lethal interpersonal violence with a wooden spear in the hominin fossil record ^[11], and the wound could be the first evidence of sharpened wooden spears in the prehistoric Middle East ^[12]. We think the first label needs the intent reading and the second needs only the spear.