The Stone Age owes its name to tools that have survived to our time. The material that early humans worked with the most, however, was probably wood because it is so much easier to process. Unfortunately, we know very little about Paleolithic woodwork, because wood rots relatively quickly. But at Abric Romaní, a rock shelter in Capellades, west of Barcelona, mineral-rich water coated wooden Neanderthal tools in a limestone-like crust. When wood was torn away, it left behind hollow molds that faithfully reflect its shape.
In a recent Science Advances study, a team of Spanish archaeologists cataloged 597 wooden remains from Neanderthal habitats dating from 62,000 to 40,000 years ago. They found spears, digging sticks, bark cups, parts of tents, and a club unlike anything seen before, suggesting that Neanderthals were probably much more than just their dumb cousins.
In addition to hunting equipment
The oldest wooden artifacts we have are mostly weapons. They include spears from a German town called Schöningen, a spearhead from Clacton-on-Sea in England, and the spear found next to an elephant skeleton in Lehringen, Germany. Most came from aquifer sediments, where a lack of oxygen slowed decay.
The traces mostly give us information about how the Neanderthals hunted. The discoveries in Abric Romaní are different because the features come from a place where Neanderthals lived, slept, cooked and made tools over the course of about 20,000 years.
“We have a sample of wooden tools for different subsistence activities, not only hunting,” says M. Gema Chacón, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) and co-author of the study. Because wood increases in level after level, it shows that woodworking was routine for Neanderthals rather than an occasional one-off.