Neanderthals' sophisticated woodworking revealed in 600-artifact Spanish site

For nearly half a century, archaeologists have dug into Abric Romaní, a rock shelter tucked into the hills near Barcelona. What they found there—nearly 600 pieces of wood, preserved in stone—tells a story about Neanderthals that stone tools alone could never reveal. Between 62,000 and 40,000 years ago, the people who sheltered in this cave did far more than chip flint. They shaped wood into spears, carved mysterious objects, built structures, and managed fuel with deliberate care. The discovery, detailed in a new study led by Palmira Saladié and her colleagues at IPHES-CERCA and Universitat Rovira i Virgili, amounts to a fundamental correction to how we understand Neanderthal technology.

For decades, stone dominated the picture. Archaeologists found hand axes, scrapers, points—the durable record of what Neanderthals could do. Wood, being organic, almost never survives the millennia. It rots, it crumbles, it vanishes. At Abric Romaní, something unusual happened. Calcium carbonate, the mineral that makes up limestone, accumulated around the wooden objects as they decayed. When the wood itself was gone, it left behind a precise natural mold in the travertine rock—a ghost of the original, detailed enough in places to show the internal structure of the wood itself. Across 16 separate archaeological levels, researchers could follow what Neanderthals did with wood not as an occasional experiment but as a steady, ordinary part of daily life.

Other European sites have hinted that Neanderthals worked wood. The spear finds at Schöningen and Lehringen in Germany stand as famous examples. What makes Abric Romaní different is the sheer depth of time and the consistency of the record. Here, researchers can watch wood use unfold across thousands of years, across many visits to the same shelter. The 597 pieces recovered include mostly raw material—trunks, branches, twigs, roots, and stacked firewood. But thirteen of those pieces show unmistakable signs of human intention. Two wooden spears came from the same level. One stretches 2.45 meters, shaped like a thrusting weapon meant for close combat. The other, preserved at 1.99 meters, bears a pointed tip with deliberate tool marks showing it was carved by hand. Very few wooden weapons from the entire European Paleolithic have survived at all.

Beyond weapons, the wood tells other stories. One object, carved from a single piece of wood, has a clear handle and a thick, pointed end—it resembles a mace, though no one can say for certain what purpose it served. The tool marks prove someone shaped it deliberately, but it matches no known artifact type. Researchers also found what appear to be bark containers or trays, suggesting Neanderthals stored or prepared food in wooden vessels. A series of crossed poles may have formed a raised platform for work. One straight wooden piece measures 5.10 meters long—it could have been a structural support, a way to organize or alter the living space, or both. Piles of firewood scattered through the layers show that fuel collection and storage followed different methods, suggesting planning and resource management.

What makes this evidence powerful is that it sits alongside other traces of daily life. The same archaeological layers hold hearths, stone tools, and animal bones. Researchers can now read wood use in context—how Neanderthals organized their activities, managed fire, and allocated space. Josep Vallverdú, one of the site's current directors, put it plainly: Neanderthal technology extended far beyond stone. The work at Abric Romaní began systematically in 1983 under Eudald Carbonell. Saladié, Gema Chacón, and Vallverdú now lead the excavations. Decades of careful digging—the kind that preserves context and allows researchers to read layers as stories—made this analysis possible. The result is a restoration of a part of the Neanderthal world that most archaeological sites have lost entirely. It suggests that when we look at other Paleolithic sites, we may be seeing only half the picture—the stone half—while the wood half has simply vanished into time.