Ancient Wooden Spears in Germany: New Research Attributes Craftsmanship to Neanderthals!
Over twenty years ago, a remarkable discovery was made in Schöningen, Germany: a set of prehistoric wooden spears buried alongside the remains of nearly 50 wild horses. Initially thought to be between 300,000 and 400,000 years old, new research suggests these spears might actually be closer to 200,000 years old. This revised dating not only changes our understanding of the timeline but also points to Neanderthals—not Homo heidelbergensis—as their creators, shedding new light on the intelligence and social skills of our closest extinct relatives.
The wooden spears, crafted from spruce and pine, were unearthed in the 1990s at a lignite coal mine. Their exceptional state of preservation earned the site, known as Schöningen 13II-4, a unique place in archaeology as the location of the best-preserved wooden hunting weapons from the Paleolithic era. Early sediment studies dated these artefacts at around 400,000 years old, linking them to Homo heidelbergensis, a species believed to be a common ancestor of both modern humans and Neanderthals.
However, advances in dating techniques have challenged this initial assumption. Archaeologist Kirsty Penkman from the University of York led a team that used amino acid geochronology to analyse fossilised freshwater snail shells found in the same sediment layer as the spears. Their findings dated the spears to roughly 200,000 years ago, placing them firmly in the Middle Paleolithic period — an era associated with increasing behavioural complexity among Neanderthal populations.
Photo Credit: Matthias Vogel, CC BY 4.0
Olaf Jöris from the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology, a co-author of the study, highlighted how extraordinary Schöningen is due to the preservation of the spears and the puzzling mismatch of their age with previous findings. The updated timeline resolves these contradictions, fitting into a broader pattern that shows Neanderthals developing sophisticated group hunting tactics and social cooperation during this period.
The spears themselves reveal impressive craftsmanship, implying that their makers possessed advanced woodworking skills alongside the cognitive ability for planning and teamwork. Given the site’s proximity to a lake and the dense concentration of horse bones, scientists theorise that Neanderthals may have driven animals towards the water’s edge, making hunting more efficient through coordinated group efforts. This behaviour suggests a level of social complexity and communication far beyond what was traditionally attributed to Neanderthals.
While this new timeline and interpretation are exciting, not everyone in the scientific community is fully convinced. Nonetheless, if these findings hold true, the Schöningen spears offer powerful evidence that Neanderthals were far from the solitary, brutish figures they were once portrayed as. Instead, they emerge as skilled, innovative hunters with advanced tools and social strategies—bringing them ever closer to modern humans in behaviour and intellect.