Neanderthals Were Expert Woodworkers, Ancient Shelter Reveals

More than 40,000 years ago, bands of Neanderthals turned a spacious rock shelter in the mountains of Spain into something that looked a lot like a home. They shaped wood into tools and spears, rigged poles into windbreaks and hut-like structures, and burned timber for heat and light. That picture comes from a first-of-its-kind trove of Neanderthal wooden artifacts recovered from a cliffside site called Abric Romaní, about 50 kilometers west of Barcelona, according to reporting by Science — evidence that our ancient cousins were genuine expert woodworkers.

The findings, published in the journal Science Advances in a 2026 paper led by Palmira Saladié of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, represent the first systematic review of nearly 600 wooden objects and imprints, all between 40,000 and 62,000 years old, collected by generations of archaeologists since the 1980s. Wood is the great missing ingredient of prehistory: unlike stone, it decomposes, so it almost never survives for archaeologists to find. At this shelter, however, wooden objects became encrusted in calcium carbonate, and as the timber rotted away it left remarkably detailed imprints in the mineral deposits. Out of the whole collection, only 13 pieces could be confirmed as used or made by Neanderthal hands; the remainder were trunks, branches, twigs, roots and firewood accumulations.

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What the wood reveals

The confirmed objects read like a carpenter's kit. There are structural poles that may have formed part of hut-like shelters, possible digging sticks, two spears, and a clublike object with a distinctly shaped handle and head that could have served as a weapon or a heavy tool. Among the domestic items are four charred bark objects that might have been trays or containers, although their exact function remains unknown; the research team suggests they may have carried food or scooped up ashes. Maria Gema Chacón, a co-author of the study, told New Scientist she was struck by "how complex Neanderthal woodworking could be, and how well they understood the properties of wood," singling out the two spears as especially impressive.

"Neanderthal technology was not only made of stone; it was also made of wood," Josep Vallverdú, also at the institute, told New Scientist. He argued that "the archaeological record gives us a very biased picture of prehistoric technology. We see the stone because it survives, while a huge part of their material culture has simply disappeared." Saladié, quoted by IFLScience, said the shelter offers "an unprecedented glimpse into everyday Neanderthal life" — hearths, stone tools, processed animals, and now wood — and that combining them lets researchers see how the group organized its living space and managed fire and resources. The study authors concluded that wood, though predominantly burned as fuel, was shaped into a wide variety of objects, and that this variability reflects "a flexible technological system supported by detailed technological knowledge and adaptive capacities."

Not everyone is ready to treat the imprints as settled reading. University of Reading archaeologist Annemieke Milks, who was not part of the research team, told Science that the material is challenging: the objects survive only as voids in the sediment, and the original wood has decayed away, erasing some details. She welcomed the trove anyway, calling it a rare chance to picture how Neanderthals actually lived day to day.

Why the dumb-brute stereotype keeps breaking

The Catalan find lands on top of older hints that woodcraft ran deep. In Germany, archaeologists have studied sharpened wooden spears roughly 300,000 years old, and in Italy, digging sticks about 171,000 years old bear signs of being shaped with fire — among the earliest clear evidence of heat-assisted toolmaking. What sets the Barcelona-area rockshelter apart is the domestic context: this is the first such collection recovered from a living space rather than as isolated finds, which is why the team describes it as a window into everyday behavior rather than a one-off marvel.

"Not so long ago, Neanderthals were considered our less complex cousins," Chacón told Science. "Now it looks like their behaviors were very close to those of Homo sapiens." That is the through-line of the last decade of Neanderthal research — from burial practices to cave art to DNA recovered from living humans — and the wooden trove adds the quietest evidence yet: people who selected species of timber for different jobs, shaped material for future use, and organized a crowded shelter around hearths.

Questions remain, and the researchers are frank about them. The bark trays may never be confidently identified, and most of the shelter's deposits have yet to be excavated, so the confirmed 13 could be the leading edge of a larger kit. But even as it stands, the study reframes a basic assumption: the period we call the Stone Age was named for the material that survives, not the one that mattered most. For a generation raised on the image of the knuckle-dragging caveman, the correction is personal — these expert woodworkers were here all along, hiding in stone's shadow.