A spear 2.45 metres long, a tripod made of three poles and a club with a 16-centimetre handle no longer exist as wood. All that is left are the cavities they left in the rock of the Abric Romaní rock shelter near Capellades, about 50 kilometres from Barcelona. The imprints show that Neanderthals made objects from wood, but only a small share of the finds are such objects. Most of the wood in the shelter was fuel.
The study was carried out by a team from the Catalan institute IPHES-CERCA, led by Palmira Saladié, and was published in Science Advances on 7 October 2026. The researchers examined 597 wooden remains from 16 archaeological levels, dated to between about 62,000 and 40,000 years ago. Only 13 are objects that Neanderthals made or used, and they come from eight levels.
Travertine keeps the shape of the wood
Water rich in calcium carbonate dripped constantly in the shelter. It coated trunks, branches and leaves, and the mineral built up around them to form travertine, a porous limestone. When the wood rotted away, a negative mould stayed in the rock, in places down to the level of single cells. This lets palaeobotanists identify the species of tree, and sometimes which part of it was used.
The deposits built up fast and buried the living floors one by one. Hearths, smashed bones, stone tools and wood lie on the same level. The travertine layer in the shelter is 17 metres thick.
In Europe, most wooden finds from the Neanderthal era are isolated pieces, as at Schöningen and Lehringen in Germany, where there are mostly digging sticks and a few spears.
Spears, bark trays and an unusual club
Two spears come from level R. The longer one was for stabbing at close range, and the second is about 1.99 metres long. The spears were found together with deer remains and stone tools.
Four charred pieces of bark, 30 to 55 centimetres long, have a hollowed upper side and probably served as shallow trays. Most are juniper, which is rare at the site. The authors suggest they held food, honey or embers.
A 5.10-metre pole, stripped of branches, may have been part of a windbreak. The tripod could also be a frame for a screen at the entrance. The most unusual find is the club made from a single piece of wood: a handle with a slightly widened base and an asymmetric head set at an angle. There is no match for it among prehistoric finds.
The casts are read through their shapes and marks. Parallel scrape marks show deliberate shaping, and from the surviving traces the researchers rebuild the order of work: choosing a trunk or branch, removing side twigs, peeling, sharpening. In their view, the burn marks on the objects most likely came after they were thrown away, not from deliberate hardening. The surroundings matter too, because hearths, bones and stone tools hint at what the wood was used for.
White pine and the limits of the casts
Most of the wood was not worked. Among the 597 remains, trunks, branches, roots and stacked firewood dominate. White pine makes up more than 90% of the identified charcoal, and branches and trunks reach up to 7.2 metres in length. Nearly all the objects are made of it, because it is dense, easy to work and has a resin that protects against damp.
The cavity in the rock wipes out tool marks and makes it harder to work out how an object was made. Shape alone does not prove what it was for, and with bark it is hard to tell a shaped tray from a piece that peeled off naturally. A single pole does not show what the whole structure looked like.
There are three ideas about the club: for finishing off wounded game, as a hammer, or as an object with symbolic meaning. Saladié compares it with examples from Australian Aboriginal groups, but admits she cannot prove any of the versions with certainty.
The authors themselves write that the collection is "relatively small" but varied in form and purpose. According to the excavation leaders, the wood shows daily life: hearths, sleeping areas and a kitchen, and their technology was not limited to stone. They suggest that woodworking and stone working developed together.
Excavations at Abric Romaní began in 1983 under Eudald Carbonell and are still going on. The site is now run by Saladié, Maria Gema Chacón and Josep Vallverdú.