A Neanderthal’s fatal wound points to a possible spear attack aimed at the heart, offering a rare glimpse of prehistoric violence.
A small, round hole in a Neanderthal’s shoulder blade suggests a wooden spear pierced the chest about 75,000 years ago. The remains, found in a cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, may preserve the earliest known evidence of lethal violence between individuals involving a wooden spear in the fossil record of the human lineage.
The individual, known as Shanidar A, was approximately 45 years old at death. A Cambridge-led team unearthed the remains in 2020 at Shanidar Cave. Alongside the shoulder blade, archaeologists recovered a mostly complete right hand, two left ribs, a fragment of a right rib, and seven teeth. Their findings are published in Scientific Reports.
A broken tooth suggests care
One of those teeth records an earlier injury that Shanidar A survived. An incisor at the front of the lower jaw had split lengthwise, leaving only half in place, while neighboring teeth had rotated inward. Substantial tartar, also called dental calculus, had accumulated along the broken tooth’s exposed root canal. That buildup suggests the tooth remained in the mouth for some time after what the researchers identify as major blunt-force trauma to the front of the face.
“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,” said Dr. Emma Pomeroy, the study’s lead author from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology.
Pomeroy suggests that others may have provided soft food while Shanidar A recovered from the initial injury. Previous research on sediment from the cave indicates that people there were soaking plant foods before cooking them around the same period. “There’s no doubt that Shanidar A would have had difficulty communicating and been in absolute agony for a long period of time.”
Bone fragments trace a fatal strike
The shoulder blade preserves evidence of a different, apparently fatal injury. This broad, flat bone, called the scapula, is so thin in places that light can almost pass through it. Yet Shanidar A’s left scapula survived nearly intact beneath 7.5 meters, or about 25 feet, of rock and sediment.
“It’s extraordinary to have a perfectly preserved scapula from 75,000 years ago. These bones are so thin that you often don’t get complete scapulae from modern burials,” said Pomeroy. “We were able to lift it out in one piece from under almost eight meters of rock and sediment.”
The exception was a circular hole 15 millimeters wide, roughly 0.6 inches across. Beveling around its edges is characteristic of an exit wound. The researchers reconstructed a strike that entered the left side of the chest from the front, passed through a lung and likely major arteries, and punched through the left shoulder blade, causing rapid death.
Tiny bone fragments displaced by the weapon helped establish its direction. Their positions suggest the spear entered from above and traveled downward. The team also fitted some fragments back into the hole, matching faint ridges where muscles had marked the bone.
The hole’s shape points to sharpened wood, the researchers argue, because a flint or stone spear tip would leave a flat or angular opening. The wound could therefore provide the first evidence that sharpened wooden spears were used in the prehistoric Middle East.
“Holes left by recreations of spears from this time are an excellent fit for the one we found in the Neanderthal scapula,” said Pomeroy, a fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. “That early technology absolutely works for this wound.”
Wood usually decomposes, leaving few weapons from such distant periods available for comparison. Some survived in waterlogged conditions at Schöningen, Germany, where spears dating to around 200,000 years ago were discovered in the 1990s. Early Neanderthals were living in Europe at that time.
Made from carefully selected timber, the Schöningen spears had weight distributions suited to throwing, much like modern javelins. Some exceeded 2 meters, or about 6.6 feet, in length and were probably used to hunt large game. An even older example, the earliest known rounded wooden spear, is more than 400,000 years old. Only its pointed end survived, recovered from the shoreline at Clacton-on-Sea in the United Kingdom in 1911.
“What evidence we have suggests that Neanderthals and their ancestors developed woodworking and weapon-making skills many thousands of years before the death of Shanidar A. This package of capabilities could have spanned the full range of Neanderthal homelands, from Wales to Siberia,” said Pomeroy.
A hunting accident remains possible
Identifying the likely weapon does not establish why it struck Shanidar A. The researchers suspect the fatal thrust may have been an intentional “heart shot,” although a hunting accident remains possible.
“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,” said Pomeroy.
Close-range hunting could also have put people in danger from one another’s weapons. As Pomeroy noted, “Animals such as mammoths may have been hunted up close with thrusting spears, so it’s easy to imagine lethal injuries.”
The circumstances cannot be recovered, including whether modern humans might have been involved. The archaeologists consider violence between Neanderthals the most straightforward interpretation.
“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,” said Professor Graeme Barker, a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, who leads the Shanidar Cave excavations.
“Evidence of systematic violence is extremely rare in deep prehistory. The vast majority comes from periods of settled farming communities thousands of years after hunter-gatherer societies like our Neanderthals.”
“The remains of Shanidar A reflect the dual nature of so much of what we recognize as human. On the one hand, we have evidence of a terribly violent end. On the other, this was clearly an individual who was cared for during their lifetime,” said Pomeroy.
Neanderthals returned to bury their dead
Shanidar, a vast cave in the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan and one of the world’s best-known Neanderthal sites, has yielded other evidence of care. Another individual, found elsewhere in the cave and living thousands of years after Shanidar A, had a paralyzed arm, arthritis, deafness, and partial blindness. Their long survival despite those conditions has been interpreted as evidence that others cared for them.
Excavations led by Ralph Solecki in the 1950s uncovered ten individuals, including a “cluster” of four who occupied the same spot despite dying at different times. Their placement suggested that Neanderthals returned there to bury their dead.
Together, these indications of social support and ritual surrounding death helped overturn the Victorian portrayal of Neanderthals as brutish and subhuman. Evidence of sophistication has continued to emerge through cave art and jewelry, while genetic analyses have revealed interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans.
“It is fascinating to have evidence for both compassion and violence amongst Neanderthals, our closest evolutionary cousins, embodied in this one individual,” said Barker.
Shanidar A is one of three further Neanderthals found in the burial cluster by the Cambridge-led team since 2015. The team now identifies five individuals, four adults and an infant, within a space just 1.5 meters long, 1 meter wide, and 1 meter deep, or about 5 by 3 by 3 feet.
The remains lie directly behind a large upright boulder, described as a “prominent marker,” with thin layers of sediment separating them. Shanidar A occupies the deepest position found so far and may have been the first individual laid there. The body rested on its back with the head facing east, matching the orientation of the body directly above it.
“The best explanation is intentional and symbolic funerary behavior,” said Pomeroy. “These Neanderthals returned to the same place to lay their dead to rest. Some were deposited before the earlier body had fully decomposed, so this was happening within years or decades.”
Reference: “Evidence for funerary behaviour and lethal trauma in a new Neanderthal individual from Shanidar Cave” by Emma Pomeroy, Christopher O. Hunt, Lucía López-Polín, Nohemi Sala, Ana Pantoja Pérez, James Holman, Jessica Twyman, Paul Bennett, Tim Reynolds, Ross Lane, Duncan Pirrie and Graeme Barker, 15 October 2026, Scientific Reports.
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-69193-z
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