Archaeologists working at Abric Romaní, a Neanderthal site near Barcelona, have recovered 597 imprints of wooden objects, 13 of which appear to be deliberately shaped tools and household items, according to ScienceAlert. The team, led by Palmira Saladié of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES), published the findings in Science Advances.
Among the identified objects is a wooden club that appears to have been shaped on purpose for striking things. ScienceAlert notes that nothing quite like it has turned up in the prehistoric record before, despite its resemblance to the prop used in cartoon depictions of cave dwellers.
The collection also includes structural poles that may have supported shelters, a tripod, pointed pieces that could have served as digging sticks, and two spears. Four charred bark objects may have functioned as trays or containers for food.
Why it matters
Wood rots. That simple fact has shaped what archaeologists know about early human technology, because stone survives where organic material usually does not. The result is a record weighted heavily toward lithic tools, even though wood was almost certainly central to daily life.
The Abric Romaní assemblage offers an unusually detailed window into that missing side of Neanderthal technology. As Saladié and her colleagues put it in the paper, wood technology probably played a significant part in human evolution but stays poorly documented because organic materials seldom last in archaeological settings. The team writes that the site's collection underscores how important wood was within Neanderthal technological systems and sheds previously unknown light on the place of organic materials in Middle Paleolithic societies.
ScienceAlert frames the discovery as evidence that Neanderthals were skilled and prolific woodworkers rather than occasional users of wooden implements. Coverage from New Scientist describes Neanderthal Europe as being as much a wooden age as a stone age, while Phys.org highlights the rarity of surviving traces of wooden tools.
How wood survives without surviving
The wood itself is gone. What remains at Abric Romaní are negative imprints preserved in limestone layers.
Before the wooden objects decayed, calcium carbonate built up around them. That mineral cast hardened into a mold of sorts, recording the shape of the original item and outlasting it by tens of thousands of years. In some cases the detail is fine enough that researchers can identify cellular-level features, which is how they confirmed they were looking at wood rather than something else.
That preservation mechanism is what makes the site distinctive. Elsewhere, wooden artifacts from the same broad period are known from only a handful of locations, and even then the evidence is thinner.
A short and uncertain comparative record
The club is the standout find partly because there is so little to compare it with. Saladié's team notes that only one possible parallel has ever been reported, from Kalambo Falls in Zambia, dated to roughly 400,000 years ago. Given how few examples exist, and how much variation recent hunter-gatherers show in how they use similar implements, the researchers say pinning down the exact function, intensity of use or behavioral context of such objects is difficult.
Earlier discoveries have pointed in the same general direction. Wooden weapons found in Germany in 1995 were dated to about 300,000 years ago. A 2018 paper described wooden tools from Tuscany in Italy dated to 171,000 years ago. A separate pair of artifacts from Greece may also have been Neanderthal work.
In each of those cases, though, attributing the craftsmanship to a specific human species has involved a degree of inference. ScienceAlert describes the identification as something closer to an archaeologist's best guess than a certainty. The Abric Romaní material, by contrast, comes from a site firmly associated with Neanderthal occupation, which strengthens the link between the objects and their makers.
What the objects suggest about daily life
Taken together, the imprints point to a range of activities rather than a single specialized craft. Shelters need poles. Digging requires pointed sticks. Hunting or defense calls for spears. Carrying food calls for containers. A club shaped for striking fits into the same practical picture.
That breadth is part of what makes the find notable. A single wooden tool might be dismissed as an anomaly. Nearly 600 imprints, with more than a dozen clearly modified items among them, describe a technological system in which wood was a routine material rather than an occasional one.
The researchers' paper argues that this kind of organic toolkit has been underrepresented in reconstructions of Middle Paleolithic life, largely for preservation reasons rather than because it was unimportant.
The findings add to a growing body of work that has steadily complicated the older image of Neanderthals as limited toolmakers. Wooden implements join evidence from other materials in suggesting a varied and adaptable approach to making things.
Further analysis of the Abric Romaní imprints, and any additional material recovered from the site, will test how far the patterns seen in this collection extend.
