The wood technology in the paleolithic era: Neanderthal discoveries
A recent study reveals the advanced use of wood as a material by Neanderthals. Discoveries and woodworking techniques unveil the technological and cognitive complexity of that period.
Hominids have used stone tools for at least 3 million years, and they likely realized the usefulness of wood around the same time. Unlike stone, wood rarely survives for centuries, so direct evidence of this is rare, although the discovery of a wooden structure dating back 476,000 years certainly shook archaeology last year (https://www.iflscience.com/worlds-oldest-wooden-structure-made-by-ancient-humans-is-476000-years-old-70782).
An exception is at Schöningen, where an astonishing 187 wooden artifacts have been found preserved in what is known as the Spear Horizon. The horizon dates to around the time when early Neanderthals were replacing Homo Heidelbergensis in Europe.
These objects have already transformed our view of these early humans, portraying them as sophisticated hunters rather than the predators once imagined. The remains arguably provide the best guide we have to how this branch of the human family tree lived, and more broadly, how hunter-gatherers thrived in Europe during interglacial periods.
The same site has also revealed other objects such as saber-toothed cat teeth turned into tools. The Spear Horizon was discovered in 1994, but uncovering all it has to offer and analyzing these precious finds has proven to be a slow process.
In a recently published study (https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2320484121) Dr. Dirk Leder of the Lower Saxony Office for Cultural Heritage and colleagues provide the first comprehensive report on the objects found there up to 2008. While the spears from the site are its most famous items, the authors report that only 20-25 were hunting weapons. Broken woods with pointed or rounded ends used for domestic purposes constituted a larger part of the sample.
These objects resemble those used by later hunter-gatherers to work animal hides, which on the site were mostly from horses. Many other purposes of the objects cannot be identified. The analysis reveals that the site's inhabitants were willing to go to great lengths to obtain the right tools.
The woods found at the site are mainly spruce, willow, and pine, although other types are also present. However, most of these show no signs of being worked by humans. The tools mainly came from spruce trees, with almost a quarter of them coming from pines.
In addition to providing a guide on which woods to use if one were ever stranded in the wild, the discovery is significant because neither spruce nor pine were available at the lakeside site. Instead, they would have been collected 3-5 kilometers away on a nearby mountain, or even further.
Leder and co-authors identify two sets of processes for creating the objects. In one, a spruce or pine tree was felled so that the branches and bark could be removed, and the trunk turned into a spear or throwing stick. Some broken woods appear to have been recycled from these items when they were no longer suitable for their original purpose.
The second process transformed knot-free wood from the base of spruces directly into broken woods for domestic uses. The complexity of the process provides an important data point in the development of Pleistocene technology, which became increasingly sophisticated over millennia.
The increase in technological complexity, note the authors, has been interpreted as a proxy for cognitive abilities and increasing reliance on social learning. The careful selection of the best woods, even if it meant a long round trip to collect and work them, demonstrates this. The objects have survived when many other tools have decayed partly because the coastline expanded as the glacier retreated, flooding the land and preserving organic material. The study is freely accessible in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
