Steven ChurchillAntrhopologist Steven Churchill holds a replica of a
Neaderthal spear in his left hand; in his right
is the kind of spear thrower that probably killed
Shanidar 3. Only modern humans make such a thrower.

Image: Duke Photography

Aiming his crossbow, Steven Churchill leaves no more than a two-inch gap between the freshly killed pig and the tip of his spear. His weapon of choice is a bamboo rod attached to a sharpened stone, modeled after the killing tools wielded by early modern humans some 50,000 years ago, when they cohabited in Eurasia with their large-boned relatives, the Neanderthals. Churchill, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, is doing an experiment to see if a spear thrown by an early modern human might have killed Shanidar 3, a roughly 40-year-old Neanderthal male whose remains were uncovered in the 1950s in Shanidar Cave in northeastern Iraq. Anthropologists have long debated about a penetrating wound seen in Shanidar 3’s rib cage: Was he injured by another Neanderthal in a fight—or was it an early modern human who went after him?

“Anyone who works on the ribs of Shanidar 3 wonders about this,” Churchill says.

The possibility that early humans attacked, killed, and drove small bands of Neanderthals to extinction has intrigued anthropologists and fascinated the public ever since Neanderthal bones were first studied in the mid-19th century. At first naturalists were not sure what to make of the funny-looking humanlike bones. But with publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the idea that the bones were from a species closely related to us began to make sense. Eventually scientists recognized that Neanderthals were an extinct species that shared a common ancestor (probably Homo heidel­bergensis) with Homo sapiens. For thousands of years, Neanderthals were the only hominids living in Europe and parts of Asia. Then, around 50,000 years ago, early modern humans migrated into Europe from Africa. By 28,000 to 30,000 years ago, the Neanderthals had disappeared.

For more than a century after their discovery, our robust relatives were depicted as dumb brutes, but the Neanderthals have had something of a face-lift in recent years. They are now considered to have been intelligent (as smart as early modern humans, some anthropologists think), perhaps red-haired and pale-skinned, and capable of speech. They might even have created their own language. The more we learn about Neanderthals, the more familiar they seem. But one deep mystery remains: Whatever happened to them, and why did they disappear?


There are many theories but not a lot of proof. That is why Churchill’s study of Shanidar 3 and another study published this year about humans cannibalizing Neanderthals are essential. They add a few details to the shadowy picture we have of our long-lost cousins. Anthropologists have many interpretations. Maybe our direct ancestors and Neanderthals largely coexisted (as did many other overlapping hominid species before them), with occasional bouts of quasi-tribal warfare that ebbed and flowed. Then again, maybe humans relentlessly drove Neanderthals into extinction. Right now these are just possibilities. Only the bones and artifacts can tell what really happened.

The Killing of Shanidar 3
Churchill’s curiosity about the fate of Shanidar 3 led him to try re-creating the sharp, deep scratch in the left ninth rib of this hapless Neanderthal. This strategy actually came from Churchill’s colleague John Shea, a paleoanthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York who reconstructs the behavior of prehistoric peoples by analyzing their stone tools. To understand how stone points are worn down when piercing flesh and bone, Shea had run a set of experiments, stabbing goat carcasses and then noting the damage to the tools.

Churchill hoped to compare the cuts on Shea’s goat bones to the mark on Shanidar 3’s rib. Unfortunately, the goat bones were so damaged by the blows that “it was impossible to analyze them,” he says.

He concluded that he would have to do his own experiments to replicate the physics of Shanidar 3’s prehistoric wound. Neanderthals were the power-thrusters of the Paleolithic world, driving their heavy spears with great kinetic energy and momentum into bison, boar, and deer. If Shanidar 3 had been injured by such a thrust, it would suggest that he had gotten into a fight with another Neanderthal, or perhaps that he had been hurt in a hunting accident. But if the wound had resulted from a lighter spear—from a projectile deftly thrown at a distance, with less momentum and energy—the attacker was most likely human. There is no evidence whatsoever that Neanderthals ever used throwing spears, Churchill says.

After inflicting a set of sample wounds on pig bones, which are close in terms of size and shape to those of Neanderthals (and which were easily obtained from a nearby slaughterhouse), Churchill and his team of students spent an evening cleaning the bones by boiling them in hot water and Biz, a laundry detergent containing enzymes that are, Churchill says, “really good at breaking down proteins.”

The process revealed signs of damage to the pig bones similar to those seen in Shanidar 3. “We cannot definitively rule out accidental wounding, attack with a knife, or attack with a hand-delivered, heavy Neanderthal spear,” Churchill says. “But Shanidar 3’s wound is most consistent with injury from a lightweight, long-range projectile weapon.”

In other words, a human probably did it.