Long before modern humans arrived in Europe, early members of the human family tree were engineering wooden spears to hunt prey along the shores of an ancient lake in central Germany. Nearby animal bones suggest these weapons, discovered in Schöningen, were used to target wild horses—and not just a few horses, but whole herds of them.
Originally unearthed in the 1990s, these spears were estimated to be around 400,000 years old, based on the sediment layers above and below where they were found. This initial dating suggested the toolmakers were likely Homo heidelbergensis, a species thought by many researchers to be a common ancestor of both modern humans and Neanderthals.
Over the years, additional research led to younger age estimates, bringing the timeline closer to 300,000 years ago. But a new study published in Science Advances pushes the date even further forward, to just 200,000 years ago.
This younger age implicates a new candidate for the people behind the creation of the Schöningen spears: the Neanderthals. If this is true—and the researchers involved in the new study believe it is—this would solve a long-standing archaeological debate while highlighting the impressive social and cognitive sophistication of Neanderthals.
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“I find the presented data set robust,” Tobias Lauer, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen who was not part of the study, told the news publication Science. “It helps us a lot to better understand the behavioral complexity of early humans.”
Reconstruction of a Neanderthal man butchering a goat at the Neanderthal Museum (Neanderthal-Museum, Mettmann/CC BY-SA 4.0).
Updated Dating Techniques Produce Enlightening Results
The spears were originally discovered in an open-pit lignite mine in Schöningen, a German site that has since become a treasure trove of prehistoric finds. However, dating such ancient tools is a formidable task.
Radiocarbon dating, which offers the most accuracy, only works for materials younger than 60,000 years. Other dating technologies, such as optical dating or stratigraphic correlation, come with their own sets of limitations.
Earlier age estimates placed the site during a warmer interval between ice ages known as an interglacial period, which from an evolutionary standpoint represented a transitional phase between H. heidelbergensis and Neanderthals. This made it difficult to confidently assign the tools to a specific species. The spears were considered too old to be the handiwork of Neanderthals, but a little too young to firmly link them to H. heidelbergensis, which is thought to have disappeared from Europe around 300,000 years ago. This raised the possibility of a “missing link” type of species, but there was no evidence to suggest that.
“Schöningen was an outlier because of how well preserved the artifacts were, but also because its age didn’t match anything else,” explained Olaf Jöris, an archaeologist at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology and a co-author of the new study.
“Because it’s so difficult to date sites from the last million years, a lot of these sites are floating in time,” added Kirsty Penkman, a geochemist from the University of York and another study co-author. “If we can do anything to narrow down the time windows, those sites become more useful for answering archaeological questions about human evolution and cultural development.”
A modern human (left) and Neanderthal (right) skeleton at the American Museum of Natural History. (Wapondaponda/CC BY-SA 4.0).
To more accurately date the Schöningen tools, Penkman decided to analyze tiny fossilized freshwater snail shells found in the same excavation layer. By analyzing amino acids preserved in the shells, her team was able to estimate the age of the surrounding sediments, with the results indicating an age of approximately 200,000 years.
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“It’s a bit disappointing when you make sites younger rather than older,” Penkman confessed. “But being 200,000 years old makes more sense from an archaeological perspective.”
Neanderthal Ingenuity Demonstrated Once Again
This new date falls squarely within the Middle Paleolithic period, a time during which more advanced behaviors began to emerge among ancient hominins. Neanderthals, who were broadly distributed across Eurasia by that point, are known to have developed complex hunting techniques and sophisticated stone tools. The well-crafted wooden spears from Schöningen demonstrate a high level of woodworking skill, hinting at cognitive capabilities not normally associated with early hominins.
Intriguingly, the site's layout suggests a strategic hunting method. Neanderthals may have worked in coordinated groups to herd horses toward the lake’s edge, where they would have been easier to kill. Such behavior would have required communication, planning, and risk-sharing, hallmarks of complex social cooperation backed by precise planning.
“The dating looks very good,” said Andrzej Wiśniewski, an archaeologist from the University of Wrocław who was not involved in the study. “Two hundred thousand years ago makes a lot of sense.”
Some experts remain cautious, pointing out that the evolutionary boundary between late H. heidelbergensis and early Neanderthals has not been well-defined.
Facial reconstruction of H. heidelbergensis. (Cicero Moraes/CC BY-SA 3.0).
“Somewhere around 300,000 years ago we see a transition to Neanderthals,” noted Thomas Terberger of Georg August University of Göttingen. “But was there a big difference between late heidelbergensis and early Neanderthals in terms of hunting strategies? I’m not so sure.”
While acknowledging that caution is called for, Jöris believes the evidence lines up with broader behavioral shifts seen in Neanderthal populations around 200,000 years ago. Fossil records from that period suggest longer lifespans, which may reflect the success of more cooperative, socially complex lifestyles.
“Something is changing in how they organize and cooperate,” he said. “Rather than a few individuals taking on dangerous animals, they’re coming together in larger groups and pooling the risk.”
If the conclusions of the researchers are true, this would represent the latest example of an archaeological discovery that shows Neanderthals were more advanced cognitively and culturally than was once believed. Neanderthals have been surprising researchers for quite some time with evidence of this sort, to the point where such evidence is no longer a surprise.
Top image: Schöningen wooden spears, dated to 200,000 years ago.
Source: Matthias Vogel/CC BY-SA 4.0.
By Nathan Falde
