Wooden tools, weapons, building materials and domestic items discovered in a Spanish cave challenge the assumption that Neanderthals’ technological life was based primarily on stone. The finds have given an unprecedented glimpse into everyday Neanderthal life and are a rare opportunity to recover part of their missing world, says Josep Vallverdú at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain. Before the Stone Age: Were the first tools made from plants not rocks?
We see the stone because it survives, while a huge part of their material culture has simply disappeared.” Vallverdú and his colleagues have now completed the first systematic review of nearly 600 wooden objects, all between 40,000 and 62,000 years old. The finds have been collected by generations of archaeologists since the 1980s, excavated at a rock shelter site called Abric Romaní near Barcelona. They include timber imprints in travertine – a rock rich in calcium carbonate that precipitates out of water in certain environments.
The rock preserves the patterns of the wood grain even though the timber long ago rotted away. Charred artefacts and actual preserved timber have also been found at the site. The researchers’ first job was to determine exactly which pieces were used or made by Neanderthals.
Most of the remainder consist of trunks, branches, twigs, roots and firewood accumulations. Maria Gema Chacón, also at the Catalan Institute, says the researchers have been surprised at how “complex Neanderthal woodworking could be, and how well they understood the properties of wood”, with the two spears being especially striking to her. The technological behaviours preserved at Abric Romaní are comparable to those documented for Homo sapiens, she says.
Stick shaped by ancient humans is the oldest known wooden tool Other finds included a mysterious wooden tripod, as well as timber trays reminiscent, in terms of likely utility, of the coolamons traditionally used by Indigenous Australians to carry food and water. Some of the wooden objects appear to be structural poles. But perhaps the item that has most surprised the team is a “club-like” object that has no precedent from any other palaeolithic site.
Palmira Saladié, also at the Catalan Institute, says the club-like object is “not simply a stick with a thicker end”. Why early humans radically changed their toolkits 200,000 years ago “We have evidence of woodworking across many archaeological levels and over thousands of years, and the objects are associated with very different activities: hunting, domestic tasks, containers and the organisation of living spaces,” he says. Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London says the archaeological record of wooden artefacts has been “severely constrained” by the generally poor preservation of organic materials.
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