Ancient bones reveal vivid details of Neanderthal elephant hunting

In the back spaces, elegant, modern Schöningen Research Museum in Germany, there are piles of old, disparate cardboard boxes everywhere. These are boxes with finds from Lehringen, a village 150 kilometers away.

In 1948, the bones of a 125,000-year-old straight elephant were found (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) were found in the ancient bed of the lake in Lehringen. Ivory from this period is not that rare, but this one had a 2.3 meter long spear sticking out between its ribs.

This yew spear was then the oldest complete spear ever found. (ON part of the spear from an earlier period was previously found at Clacton-on-Sea in the United Kingdom.) The Lehringen spear is still the only one found in the skeleton of an extinct species of animal. Neanderthals were the only humans in Europe at the time, as far as we know, so the spear seemed to provide paradigm-shifting evidence that Neanderthals were big game hunters, not scavengers. It was to become a world famous find.

However, there were problems. The excavation was undertaken by Alexander Rosenbrock, the principal of the local school and an amateur archaeologist who was also running museum in nearby Verden. The mining operation that discovered the bones removed about half of them before Rosenbrock could be elevatored to the site with his daughter and several volunteers.

Some of the bones had already been stolen when he arrived, and Rosenbrock didn’t have a camera. He was unable to sketch what he found in the lake deposits, including the relative position of bones and spears. A seven-year legal battle was then fought over the findings. Rosenbrock won the right to keep them at Verden, which probably contributed to their subsequent secrecy. The teacher then died in the 1950s before publishing his findings.

Over the next 75 years, doubts grew about Lehringen. Were spears and bones found together just by chance? The researchers had access to the finds twice, but assumed that the elephant bones had already been examined and found to contain no traces of butchery.

Flash forward to 2025 when Ivo Verheijena local bone expert in Schöningen, began looking at the Lehringen finds.

“I was told there would only be a few 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 center of Schöningen, where Verheijen is based, is 300 meters from the archaeological site, which has been active since the mid-1990s. Most famously, 10 spears, some 300,000 years old, were found here on the edge of a former quarry. These, plus the Clacton spear and the Lehringen spear, are the only definitively identified spears ever found from the Paleolithic period, which lasted from 3.3 million years ago to 12,000 years ago.

In 2017, he found the team in Schöningen a complete elephant at the site, so Verheijen already had considerable experience with ancient ivories before he turned his attention to Lehringen.

Verheijen removes an old soap box from the top of the cabinet. Inside are some freshwater shells from the Lehringen excavation and a find label. He turns the label over to show me that it’s actually a 50 million mark note from the post-World War I runaway inflation era. “They always only printed them on one side,” he says. “So good for making labels with finds.

For Verheijen and his colleagues, this project was something of a detective story with a chilling situation. Fortunately, when the find boxes arrived, they contained not only the bones of the elephant and other species found during the digging and the flint tools found at the scene, but also written records of Rosenbrock’s work, which were taken up by his daughter Waltraut Deibel-Rosenbrock after his death.

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

The elephant was not an ancient animal as it was written in the 1940s. He died in his prime, aged about 30. It was probably a male, over 12 feet tall at the shoulder. That makes sense because male elephants are more likely to be alone, Verheijen says, and would therefore be safer targets for hunters than females.

He was butchered from the outside as well as from the inside, suggesting that his organs had been harvested. This in turn suggests that it was freshly dead when the Neanderthals worked on it. It is also very likely that he died with a spear in his side and that it was no coincidence that his bones and weapon were found together.

People harvested what they could from the animal using simple flint flakes and then left the rest to the scavengers; not all bones have butchery marks. Also found at the site were the bones of bears, beavers, and bison, which appeared to have been slaughtered for both meat and skin. This suggests that Neanderthals regularly hunted and processed animals on the shores of the lake.

Verheijen tells me that when a modern elephant is injured, it tends to go to the water, so the injured animal probably made it to the shore of the lake after being stabbed in the side by a spear. It suggests that multiple spears may have been involved and that people followed the wounded elephant until it collapsed. As the animal fell, it crushed one spear beneath it; that’s the one left at the scene. The team plans to re-examine the spear.

Even halfway through, however, the project has already provided one of the most vivid and detailed Neanderthal hunting scenes we’re likely to ever see.

Verheijen is also now working to preserve Lehringen’s bones for display. “This is one of the most important Neanderthal sites in Germany,” he says. “It’s kind of been forgotten, but we’re trying to give it the stage it deserves.”

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