In the famous Shanidar Cave, located in Iraqi Kurdistan, a Neanderthal died violently about 75,000 years ago. The victim (Shanidar A) was an adult about 45 years old with a circular puncture on his left shoulder blade consistent with a sharp wooden spear blow. We can infer two things from these deaths: lethal violence existed in the Middle Paleolithic, and people still cared for their wounded and their dead.
discovery. The research team analyzed small displaced bone fragments and radial fractures around a 15-millimeter hole in the scapula, and with those fragments they were able to reconstruct part of the hole. The trajectory of the weapon indicates that it entered the front of the chest from above, passed through the left lung and possibly the great artery, and exited through the shoulder blade. The team speculates that it could be a heart attack.
But these remains also indicate that the same person survived a severe facial injury long ago that probably disfigured it and destroyed some of its teeth. Because of such an injury, he probably needed care for some time. The skeleton reflects two sides of the same human coin: the harsh reality of violence and the compassion of care, the team highlighted in an official statement from the University of Cambridge.
Why is it important?. Because it may be the earliest evidence of lethal interpersonal violence with wooden spears in the hominin fossil record. Graeme Barker, a professor at Cambridge and director of the excavations, explained that “evidence for systematic violence in deep prehistory is extremely rare” and comes mostly from sedentary farming communities thousands of years later.
Since the 19th century, the stereotype of Neanderthals as brutal animals without empathy has weighed, and Shanidar has been helping to correct it for decades, and this is further evidence: to survive such injuries, someone had to help eat someone. The site also points to symbolic funerary behavior: Shanidar A is the deepest person in a set of five corpses deposited in the same place, behind a large stone. For Emma Pomeroy, one of the authors, this constitutes the best explanation of deliberate funeral behavior, repeated over the years.
Injured but alive. Tartar build-up on the exposed root of the cracked tooth indicates that the fragment was in the mouth for quite some time after the injury, and the team estimates that it may have survived for at least a year, possibly more.
Despite describing the lesion with anatomical accuracy, it is not possible to know for sure what happened. Pomeroy acknowledged that it could have been a hunting accident, as large animals such as mammoths could be hunted at close range with thrust spears, but believed that the location of the wound and the force required indicated a deliberate act of violence. Archaeologists consider violence among Neanderthals to be the simplest explanation.
Shanidar, the key to the Neanderthals. Shanidar Cave is a true gem for paleontology. In fact, it helped us understand better Homo neanderthalensis. Excavations in the 1950s led by Ralph Solecki of Columbia University found ten individuals, including Saturn 1, an adult of about 50,000 years, who survived to old age. Since 2015, the Cambridge team has found three more people in the funerary complex.
Finding evidence of attacks with wooden weapons in such antiquity is difficult because wood is almost never preserved, but there are some exceptions (usually in places with water), such as Schöningen (Germany), about 200,000 years old, or Capellades in Barcelona, 40,000 years ago.
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cover Emma Pomeroy et al.
