This Might Be the Earliest Known Spear Murder In Earth’s History

A Neanderthal named Shanidar A may have been killed by a sharpened wooden spear about 75,000 years ago, then buried by others in Shanidar Cave in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan. If the team is right, this is not just an old wound. It may be one of the earliest direct signs of interpersonal violence ever found in a hominin, the group that includes humans and our close relatives.

The bones were dug up in 2020 from deep in the cave floor. What survived tells a grim story: a puncture in the shoulder blade suggests the spear passed through the chest and out the back, likely hitting the heart. Shanidar A also had a severe facial injury that had partly healed, which points to care from others while the person recovered.

The burial context matters just as much as the injury. The remains were placed in a small area of the cave that also held other Neanderthal bones, a setup the researchers say looks like an intentional burial ground. Emma Pomeroy and colleagues at the University of Cambridge argue that the positioning strongly suggests care during and after death, not a random pile of bones.

There’s still a catch, and it’s a big one. The wound could have come from a fight with another Neanderthal, from a member of Homo sapiens, or from an accident while hunting. However it happened, Shanidar A adds to the picture of Neanderthals as capable of care, recovery, and funerary ritual, not just rough survival in caves.