After Nearly 80 Years of Doubt, Scientists Say a Spear Lodged Between Elephant Ribs Offers Evidence That Neanderthals Hunted Big Game

In 1948, amateur archaeologists unearthed the remains, which should have shifted researchers’ views of Neanderthals. But poor documentation sowed skepticism in the scientific community

Margherita Bassi | Daily Correspondent

April 10, 2026

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Researchers may have finally settled a decades-old debate about a Neanderthal hunting scene in what’s now Germany.

In 1948, amateur archaeologists unearthed a 125,000-year-old straight-tusked elephant skeleton with a nearly eight-foot-long wooden spear between its ribs at a site called Lehringen. Since Neanderthals were the only humans to inhabit modern-day Europe at the time, the discovery was one of the first to suggest they hunted big game. But some researchers doubted that interpretation due to strange excavation circumstances.

Now, a new analysis that identified cut marks on the bones suggests that the archaic humans did, indeed, hunt and butcher the creature—a member of the largest land mammal species to ever roam Europe, which is now extinct. The findings were described in a study published March 24 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Neanderthals are now thought to have been skilled, adaptable hunters. But long ago, researchers dismissed them as primitive scavengers. The Lehringen finds “seemed to deliver a literal smoking gun,” the study authors write, “testifying the first successful large herbivore hunting event of Neanderthals and underlining the technological and cognitive abilities of Middle Paleolithic hominins.”

But the poor conditions and little documentation of the amateur-led excavation—which also recovered flint and additional animal and botanical remains—sowed skepticism. The head of the project, local school principal Alexander Rosenbrock, lacked a camera, and he failed to sketch how the spear and elephant skeleton were found, reports New Scientist’s Emily H. Wilson. It didn’t help that some of the bones were stolen by the time he arrived, and he died before officially sharing news about what the group unearthed.

Ultimately, some scientists suspected that the spear was not a hunting tool—and perhaps was instead used for digging or probing snow—and that it may have coincidentally ended up near the elephant remains.

But archaeologist Ivo Verheijen, of the University of Tübingen in Germany, wanted to revisit the nearly 80-year-old conundrum. So, in 2025, he began to investigate the Lehringen finds housed at the Schöningen Research Museum, roughly 90 miles from the excavation site.

“I was told there would only be a couple of boxes,” Verheijen tells New Scientist. “But when we got to the museum to collect them, they were in the attic, right under the roof … and there was a truckload of them.”

Although the team doesn’t know the spear and elephant remains’ exact initial positions, they did identify cut marks on the animal’s ribs and vertebrae, hinting that Neanderthals butchered the creature. The locations of the slices suggest that the archaic humans cut through the animal’s chest cavity to reach its organs, which may have been highly valued for their high protein content.

What’s more, analysis of the elephant’s teeth suggested it died at around 30 years old, which means Neanderthals hunted it during its prime. Other skeletal features hinted the animal was male and carried about 7,700 pounds of meat, organs and fat—enough to sustain many people for a long time.

In recent decades, researchers have found signs that Neanderthals indulged in elephant meat. For example, a team identified cut marks on straight-tusked elephant remains from another site in Germany called Neumark-Nord 1, which they reported in 2023. However, the spear stuck between the elephant ribs at Lehringen, along with the new supporting analysis, provides the most persuasive evidence of a successful Neanderthal elephant hunt, the researchers write.

“Neanderthals knew what they were doing,” Britt Starkovich, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen who did not participate in either study, wrote in 2023 in an article accompanying the older study. “They knew which kinds of individuals to hunt, where to find them and how to execute the attack. Critically, they knew what to expect with a massive butchery effort and an even larger meat return.”

Verheijen and his colleagues also found evidence that Neanderthals processed other animals at Lehringen. Marks on brown bear bones, for instance, suggest that Neanderthals made use of the animal’s bone marrow, while those on beaver remains hint that the human relatives collected the creature’s meat and fur.

“The finds, which were recovered under difficult conditions in 1948, provide a crucial building block for an up-to-date understanding of Neanderthals, who were already hunting strategically with the same level of skill as anatomically modern humans were 125,000 years ago,” study co-author Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at Georg-August-University Göttingen in Germany, says in a statement.

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Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.