Ancient elephant bones reveal vivid details of a Neanderthal hunt

In the backrooms of the sleek, modern Schöningen Research Museum in Germany, there are piles of old, mismatched cardboard boxes everywhere. These are the finds boxes from Lehringen, a hamlet 150 kilometres from here.

In 1948, the bones of a 125,000-year-old straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) were found in an ancient lakebed at Lehringen. Elephant bones from this time period are not so rare, but this one had a 2.3-metre-long spear sticking between its ribs.

This yew thrusting lance was then the oldest complete spear ever found. (A part of a spear from an earlier period had previously been found in Clacton-on-Sea in the UK.) The Lehringen spear is still the only one found lodged in the skeleton of an extinct species of animal. Neanderthals were the only humans in Europe at this time, as far as we know, so the spear appeared to provide paradigm-shifting proof that Neanderthals were big game hunters, not scavengers. It should have become a world-famous find.

There were problems though. The excavation was undertaken by Alexander Rosenbrock, a local school principal and amateur archaeologist who also ran the museum in nearby Verden. The mining operation that discovered the bones removed about half of them before Rosenbrock could beg a lift to the site with his daughter and some volunteers.

Some bones had already been stolen by the time he arrived, and Rosenbrock did not have a camera. He failed to sketch what he found in the lake deposits, including the relative positions of the bones and the spear. There was then a seven-year legal battle over the finds. Rosenbrock won the right to keep them in Verden, arguably contributing to their subsequent obscurity. The teacher then died in the 1950s before publishing on his finds.

Over the next 75 years, doubts grew over Lehringen. Were the spear and bones only found together by chance? Researchers accessed the finds twice, but they assumed the elephant bones had already been examined and found to be free of any butchery marks.

Cut forward to 2025, when Ivo Verheijen, the resident bones expert at Schöningen, started to take a look at the finds from Lehringen.

“I was told there would only be a couple of boxes,” says Verheijen. “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.”

The Schöningen centre where Verheijen is based stands 300 metres from an archaeological dig site that has been active since the mid-1990s. Most famously, 10 spears of about 300,000 years in age have been found here at the edge of a former quarry. These, plus the Clacton spear and Lehringen spear, are the only definitively identified spears ever found from the Palaeolithic Age, which lasted from 3.3 million years ago until 12,000 years ago.

In 2017, the team at Schöningen found a complete elephant on site, so Verheijen already had considerable experience with ancient elephant bones before turning his attention to Lehringen.

Verheijen takes down an old soap box from the top of a cupboard. Inside are some freshwater shells from the Lehringen dig, and a finds label. He turns the label over to show me that it is actually a 50 million mark note, from a time of runaway inflation after the first world war. “They only ever printed them on one side,” he says. “So good for making finds labels.”

This project has been something of a cold-case detective story for Verheijen and his colleagues. Fortunately, when the boxes of finds arrived, they contained not only bones, both of the elephant and other species found during the dig, and flint tools found at the scene, but also written evidence of Rosenbrock’s work, which was taken up by his daughter, Waltraut Deibel-Rosenbrock, after his death.

It did not take Verheijen long to deduce that the Lehringen elephant was butchered. “Quite quickly… we found some cut marks that were super clear,” he says. “It’s almost difficult to imagine that nobody noticed [them].”

The elephant was not an old animal, as had been reported in the 1940s. It died in its prime, aged about 30. It was probably a male, standing more than 3.5 metres tall at the shoulder. This makes sense, because male elephants are more likely to be alone, Verheijen says, and therefore would have been safer targets for hunters than females.

It was butchered from the outside, but also from the inside, indicating that its organs were harvested. That, in turn, indicates it was freshly dead when the Neanderthals worked on it. It also makes it overwhelmingly likely that it died with the spear in its side, and that it was no coincidence its bones and the weapon were found together.

The humans harvested what they could of the animal, using simple flint flakes, and then left the rest for scavengers; not all the bones have butchery marks. Also found at the site were the bones of bears, beavers and aurochs, which looked to have been butchered both for their flesh and for their skin. This indicates the Neanderthals were regularly hunting and processing animals at the lakeside.

Verheijen tells me that when a modern elephant is hurt, it tends to go to water, so the injured animal probably made its way to the lakeside after the spear was stuck in it its side. He suggests there may have been more spears involved, and that the humans followed the injured elephant until it collapsed. When the animal went down, it crushed one spear beneath it; that’s the one that got left at the scene. The team plans to re-examine the spear next.

Even at its halfway mark, though, the project has already provided one of the most vivid and detailed Neanderthal hunting scenes we are ever likely to get.

Verheijen is also now working to preserve the Lehringen bones, so that they can go on display. “This is one of the most important Neanderthal sites in Germany,” he says. “Somehow it got forgotten about, but we’re trying to give it the stage it deserves.”

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