Europe’s Oldest Bone-Tipped Hunting Weapon Was Likely Made By Neanderthals

The oldest known bone spear tip in Europe has been identified in a cave in southwest Russia. Dated to between 70,000 and 80,000 years ago, the ancient artifact was crafted tens of millennia before modern humans arrived in the region, and was likely fashioned by Neanderthals as a hunting weapon.

Such a find is remarkable given that there are currently very few bone tools or weapons associated with Neanderthal sites from the Middle Paleolithic. Indeed, the vast majority of examples appear in the archaeological record only after the arrival of Homo sapiens in Eurasia some 45,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic.

Worldwide, the oldest known artifact of this type is a bone knife that was manufactured by modern humans in Morocco around 90,000 years ago. The revelation that Neanderthals were also working with bone at around the same time, therefore, adds to our understanding of their skill, ingenuity, and capacity for innovation.

Describing the item as a “unique pointy bone artefact”, the authors of a new study explain that the relic was first discovered in 2003 but has only now been analyzed in detail. Using a series of techniques including microscopy, spectroscopy, and computed tomography, the researchers identified the object as “a bone tool intentionally modified and shaped by scraping, flat cutting, and possibly grinding, and showing the external and internal traces that suggest its use as a hunting weapon (possibly, bone-tipped hunting projectile).”

“The specimen reported in this paper is unique to… Mezmaiskaya cave, and for any [Lower Middle Paleolithic] context associated with Neanderthals across the whole of Europe and Asia,” they write.

A tar-like residue found on the bone point indicated that it had once been hafted onto a wooden shaft, while use-wear analysis revealed that it had struck a hard object, thus suggesting that the weapon had been deployed. A lack of smoothing or polishing, meanwhile, indicates that the item had not been used repeatedly, leading the researchers to suspect that it was probably fired once, leading to a successful kill.

Overall, they deemed the specimen to be a “proportionally, dimensionally, and functionally effective bone projectile,” probably made from bison bone.

More significantly, the authors say their work “suggests that at least some groups of… Neanderthals in Europe [had] started to develop bone-tipped hunting weapons, and that they made this invention independently and without influence from... modern humans that started to arrive to the continent much later.”

The study is published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.