Shanidar A: the oldest human killed by a spear?

A plate of bone so thin it turns almost translucent when lifted to the light. That is nearly all that remains of the left shoulder of a NeanderthalNeanderthalsA fossil humanity of Eurasia, robust and cold-adapted, extinct around 40,000 years before present.→ who died some 75,000 years ago, buried under almost eight metres of rock and sediment in a cave in the Zagros Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. The shoulder blade survived the whole of prehistoryPrehistoryThe span of human history before the invention of writing, from the Palaeolithic to the Metal Ages, known mainly through material remains.→ intact, save for one thing: a nearly perfect circular hole, fifteen millimetres across, punched through the bone the way a modern bullet might pass through a door. In October 2026, a University of Cambridge team put forward a striking hypothesis in the journal Scientific Reports: that perforation marks a sharpened wooden spear, driven into the chest toward the heart. If the reading holds, this fossil, named Shanidar A, could be the oldest known case of a human, in the broad sense, killed by a weapon.¹

A near perfect hole in an old shoulder blade

When the drill of time stops, a complete scapulascapulaThe flat, triangular bone of the shoulder, also called the shoulder blade, connecting the arm to the trunk.→ is rarely what is left. The shoulder blade is a flat, broad bone, stretched across zones so thin they shatter at the slightest knock; even in modern burials, it is often recovered in pieces. That is what makes the Shanidar specimen so exceptional, lifted from the cave floor in a single piece. "It's extraordinary to have a perfectly preserved scapula from 75,000 years ago," notes Emma Pomeroy, a researcher at Cambridge's Department of Archaeology and lead author of the study. "We were able to lift it out in one piece from under almost eight metres of rock and sediment."¹

The hole owes nothing to preservation. It is clean, regular, almost geometric. Around the opening, the archaeologists spotted a bevel, a thinning typical of exit wounds, as though something had pushed the bone from the inside out. Better still: in the sediment directly beneath the shoulder blade, the team found tiny bone fragments displaced at the moment of impact. By fitting them back together, guided by faint ridges left on the bone by muscle attachments, they reconstructed part of the rim of the perforation. The position of those slivers points to a weapon that entered from above, on a downward trajectory. Everything in the geometry of the lesion tells of a blow struck from the front and from above, piercing the rib cage before exiting through the back of the shoulder.¹²

Shanidar A: what remains of an individual

A code name, two letters, and yet a person. Shanidar A is not a complete skeleton: it is a set of fragments, studied as so many clues. The left shoulder blade is the centrepiece, accompanied by two left ribs and a right-rib fragment, a nearly complete right hand, and seven teeth. From these remains, the researchers estimate an adult of around forty, perhaps forty-five years old, already a respectable age for a PalaeolithicPalaeolithicThe oldest and longest period of prehistory (c. 3.3 Ma–12,000 BC), defined by chipped stone tools and a hunter-gatherer way of life.→ hunter-gatherer.¹

PalaeopathologyPalaeopathologyThe study of diseases, injuries and trauma on ancient human or animal remains.→, the discipline that reads diseases and injuries in ancient bone, turns this debris into a biography. Every surface, every fracture, every deposit of tartar becomes a line of narrative. The delicate right hand suggests an individual who gripped, knapped, made things. The ribs and shoulder blade, by contrast, carry the mark of a far more brutal act. But it is the assemblage as a whole that interests the researchers: Shanidar A is not only a victim but a body that lived, suffered, then was carefully laid in a precise spot in the cave. The same bones thus tellTellAn artificial mound formed by the accumulation of successive layers of settlement remains at the same spot, typical of the Near East. Each destruction-rebuilding event adds a stratum.→ two apparently contradictory stories, one of a violent end, the other of an attentive community. To read them, the researchers combined micro-excavation in the field, careful conservation in the laboratory, three-dimensional scanning and the refitting of displaced fragments, a painstaking method that turns a handful of broken pieces into a reconstruction precise enough to debate the angle of a single blow.¹

The signature of a wooden spear

Why a wooden spear rather than a stone tip? The answer lies first in the shape of the hole. A flintFlintA hard, brittle siliceous rock, knapped by prehistoric people to produce blades, points and sharp tools.→ or stone armatureArmatureThe cutting or piercing element (stone, bone) fixed to the tip of an arrow, javelin or spear.→, knapped into a blade or a lozenge, generally leaves a flat, elongated gash with angular edges. The perforation in Shanidar A, however, is round, almost circular, exactly the profile produced by a hardened, pointed wooden shaft. That geometry is what put Emma Pomeroy on the trail of an all-wood weapon.¹³

To test the idea, the team turned to experimental archaeology. Replicas of spears matching models known for the period were thrown or thrust into targets, and the resulting holes were compared with the fossil original. For the researcher the verdict is clear: "Holes left by recreations of spears from this time are an excellent fit for the one we found in the Neanderthal scapula. That early technology absolutely works for this wound." The reconstructed scenario is precise: the spear enters the left chest cavity from the front, travels through the body, likely perforates a lung and probably major arteries, then smashes through the shoulder blade from behind. Death must have been rapid. Given the position and the force needed to drive the weapon right through the thorax, the authors judge that the blow bears "the hallmarks of an intended kill shot directed toward the heart".¹

Spears 400,000 years old

The wooden-spear hypothesis is anything but implausible, because NeanderthalsNeanderthalsA fossil humanity of Eurasia, robust and cold-adapted, extinct around 40,000 years before present.→ and their ancestors had mastered woodworking since time out of mind. The trouble is that wood rots: very few wooden objects have crossed the hundreds of millennia that separate us from the Middle Palaeolithic. The handful of surviving examples owe their survival to luck, most often to waterlogged sediments that halted decay.⁴

The oldest known wooden spear, recovered in 1911 from the shoreline at Clacton-on-Sea in England, is over 400,000 years old; only its sharpened tip survived, carved from yew. Half a million years later, at Schöningen in Germany, excavators in the 1990s unearthed an exceptional set of wooden spears, some more than two metres long, shaped from carefully selected spruce and pine, with weight distribution optimised for throwing, like a modern javelin. Their age is debated, from 300,000 to perhaps 200,000 years depending on the method, but their careful manufacture is beyond doubt. A third site, Lehringen, yielded a yew spear nearly two and a half metres long, wedged between the ribs of a straight-tusked elephant killed some 120,000 years ago, proof that such weapons were used to bring down very large game at close quarters.⁴⁵

These spears were no mere sharpened sticks. The Schöningen weapons in particular reflect genuine engineering: the choice of dense, knot-free wood, a gradual taper, a point set off-centre to balance the flight, finishing with a scraper. Experimental studies using replicas have shown that they could be thrown effectively over several metres and inflict lethal wounds, challenging the notion of a Neanderthal unable to hunt at a distance. The long-dominant image of hunting purely by thrusting, simply driving the spear into a cornered animal, is thereby qualified: these humans had a more flexible arsenal than once imagined.⁴⁵

This long technological lineage changes everything for Shanidar A. "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," recalls Emma Pomeroy. "This package of capabilities could have spanned the full range of Neanderthal homelands, from Wales to Siberia." Close-contact hunting, in which the hunter approaches the animal to run it through, carried a permanent risk of death; but it also placed, in the hands of those hunters, a weapon capable of killing one of their own. The weapon that pierced the shoulder blade of Shanidar A thus belongs to a tradition hundreds of thousands of years old, which makes the hypothesis of a wound caused by a wooden spear all the more credible.¹

Murder, brawl or hunting accident?

Here is the crux of the matter: what really happened 75,000 years ago? The researchers are entirely honest on this point, it is impossible to decide. Several scenarios coexist, and none can be definitively ruled out from the bones alone.¹

First possibility, a hunting accident. Emma Pomeroy readily acknowledges it: "Animals such as mammoths may have been hunted up close with thrusting spears, so it's easy to imagine lethal injuries." In the scrum of a big-game hunt, a clumsy thrust, a sudden movement of the animal, and a companion's spear could run a hunter through. One might also picture a blow meant to finish off a dying beast that went astray. Second possibility, deliberate violence, a targeted killing or a brawl that turned deadly. The position of the wound and the force required to pass through the whole body lean, in the team's view, toward an intentional strike. Then comes the most unsettling question: who held the spear? Another Neanderthal, on the most straightforward reading favoured by the archaeologists; but the period also coincides with the expansion of Homo sapiensHomo sapiensThe present-day human species, which emerged in AfricaAfricaThe cradle of humankind: the continent where the first hominins appeared, then Homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago, before the expansion to the rest of the world.→ around 300,000 years ago, the only surviving human lineage after the extinction of Neanderthals and Denisovans.→ out of AfricaOut of AfricaThe dispersals of Homo sapiens out of Africa, including a major expansion c. 70,000 to 60,000 years ago and earlier exits.→, and the involvement of our own species cannot be formally excluded. In the Middle East, the two humanities lived side by side for tens of thousands of years, interbred, and perhaps at times clashed. Levantine sites such as Manot Cave in Israel, or the burials of Skhul and QafzehQafzehA cave in Lower Galilee (Israel) yielding Homo sapiens and some of the oldest known burials outside Africa.→, document this long cohabitation; some researchers read it as a largely peaceful coexistence, others as more fraught contact. The genetic data, meanwhile, are now beyond dispute: gene flow passed between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and every non-African human today carries its trace. Without an archaeological context around the body, it remains impossible to say whether Shanidar A was killed by a kinsman, by a rival from their own people, or by a newcomer out of Africa. "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," sums up Professor Graeme Barker, who leads the Shanidar excavations.¹⁶

A life marked by pain and by care

Before dying at the end of a spear, Shanidar A had already suffered a great deal. Among the seven recovered teeth, a lower-jaw incisor had been split lengthwise; only half remains, and the neighbouring teeth had rotated inward. Such trauma can only be explained by a violent blow, a direct hit to the face, long before the final drama.¹

How do we know the injury is old? Thanks to tartar. Along the root canal laid bare by the fracture, the researchers observed a heavy build-up of dental calculus, the mineralised deposit that forms slowly. Its presence means the half-tooth stayed in the mouth long after the blow, at least a year and perhaps more. In other words, Shanidar A survived a major facial trauma, then went on living and eating for months. "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," explains Emma Pomeroy. The group probably adapted its diet, feeding the individual soft foods; earlier work on the cave sediments shows precisely that plants were being soaked before cooking at 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," the researcher adds. PalaeopathologyPalaeopathologyThe study of diseases, injuries and trauma on ancient human or animal remains.→ thus sketches the portrait of a diminished, suffering individual, yet one who was surrounded. "The remains of Shanidar A reflect the dual nature of so much of what we recognise as human," she concludes. "On the one hand, evidence of a terribly violent end; on the other, an individual who was clearly cared for during their lifetime."¹

Shanidar, the cave of ten Neanderthals

To understand Shanidar A, one must go back to the story of the cave itself, one of the most famous Neanderthal sites on the planet. Set in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, this vast cavity was excavated from the 1950s and 1960s by the American archaeologist Ralph Solecki. His campaigns brought to light the remains of ten individuals, the famous "Shanidar 1 to 10", including a cluster of four gathered in the same spot although they died at different times, already suggesting that Neanderthals returned to bury their dead in the same place.⁷

It was at Shanidar that the celebrated "flower burial" hypothesis was born. Around one of the skeletons, Solecki and the palynologist Josette Leroi-Gourhan had detected heavy concentrations of pollen, read as bouquets laid on the dead, a moving image of a grave dressed with flowers. The idea fed decades of imagination, but it is now hotly debated: more recent studies suggest the pollen may have been brought into the cave naturally, by burrowing rodents or by solitary ground-nesting bees, which weakens the deliberate-bouquet scenario. Another occupant of the cave, Shanidar 1, nicknamed "Nandy", also left his mark: this man had a withered and probably amputated right arm, severe leg injuries, a degenerative disease, a fractured face, and bony growths in the ear canals that almost certainly left him deaf. Despite all this, he lived to forty or fifty. Such an age, in such a condition, was only possible with the sustained help of his group. BurialBurialThe intentional deposition of a body, sometimes with offerings; a marker of symbolic behaviourSymbolic behaviourA set of practices (adornment, pigments, art, burial) reflecting symbolic thought; long ascribed to Homo sapiens alone, now attested for Neanderthals too.→.→ and care, at Shanidar, are not mere words.⁷⁸

Barker, Shanidar Z and the return to the cave

After Solecki, the cave fell silent. It found its voice again in 2015, when a University of Cambridge team led by Graeme Barker reopened the old trench. The campaigns, interrupted for a time by regional insecurity, yielded a spectacular new skeleton, Shanidar Z, whose skull, flattened by the weight of sediment, was uncovered from 2018. This work revealed that the cave had seen two main phases of Neanderthal occupation, one around 75,000 years ago, the other between roughly 50,000 and 45,000 years ago.⁶⁷

Shanidar A, excavated in 2020, belongs to this effort. It is one of the individuals found in a single funerary cluster, concentrated in a tiny space, one and a half metres long, one metre wide, one metre deep, set directly behind a large vertical boulder serving as a marker. Since 2015, the Cambridge team has identified three new Neanderthals there, bringing to five the total of bodies laid in the spot, four adults and an infant, separated by thin layers of sediment. Shanidar A is the deepest of the group, hence probably the first laid in this space, stretched on their back, head turned east, exactly like the body directly above. "The best explanation is intentional and symbolic funerary behaviour," judges Emma 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." Graeme Barker sees a thread running through it: "It is fascinating to have evidence for both compassion and violence among Neanderthals, our closest evolutionary cousins, embodied in this one individual."¹⁶

Other ways of being human

The story of Shanidar A reaches far beyond a prehistoric news item. It touches the question that has obsessed palaeoanthropologyPalaeoanthropologyThe science that studies human evolution from the fossil remains of hominins (bones, teeth, footprints) and their context, to reconstruct our biological origins.→ for a century: who were the NeanderthalsNeanderthalsA fossil humanity of Eurasia, robust and cold-adapted, extinct around 40,000 years before present.→ really? Long caricatured as stooped, stupid brutes, a legacy of a Victorian view, they now appear as fully human, with cave art, ornaments, funerary practices, and a genome that still lives in us, since present-day non-African populations carry a few per cent of Neanderthal DNADNAThe molecule carrying genetic information, used to reconstruct kinship between species.→.⁶

What Shanidar A adds to this picture is moral complexity. In a single body coexist the evidence of prolonged, patient care, costly to the group, and that of a brutal killing at the end of a weapon. Neanderthals were neither compassionate angels nor bloodthirsty beasts, but, like us, beings capable of both. "Evidence of systematic violence is extremely rare in deep prehistory," Graeme Barker reminds us. "The vast majority comes from periods of settled farming communities thousands of years after hunter-gatherer societies like our Neanderthals." That rarity makes Shanidar A all the more precious. It forces us to think of humanity in the plural, to accept that there existed, alongside our own lineage, other ways of being human, with their tendernesses and their cruelties. A pierced shoulder blade, 75,000 years old, thus holds up an unexpected mirror: that of a vanished species in which we recognise, perhaps all too well, our own contradictions.¹⁶