What Did Neanderthals Hunt? Ice Age Prey and Rivals

Between about 1985 and 1996, rescue excavations in a lignite mine at Neumark-Nord, near Halle in Germany, recovered the remains of more than 70 straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus). The bones date to about 125,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were the only humans in the region. A 2023 study by Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser and colleagues found cut marks across the skeletons, mostly on adult males, the largest and most dangerous animals in the herd.

The authors calculated that one large carcass could have fed 100 adults for nearly a month. That single site answers a large part of the question what did Neanderthals hunt: almost anything, including the biggest land mammals of their world.

What did Neanderthals hunt most often?

Elephants make headlines, but most Neanderthal meals came from medium and large hoofed animals. The mix changed with climate and region.

At Salzgitter-Lebenstedt in northern Germany, a reindeer assemblage about 55,000 years old is dominated by prime-age adults, killed in autumn when they carry the most fat. Lions and wolves tend to take the young, old and weak. A focus on prime adults points to planned, selective hunting.

How Neanderthals hunted

Neanderthals hunted with wooden spears, some tipped with stone points. The best direct evidence is the Lehringen spear, a yew-wood shaft about 2.4 metres long found in 1948 among the bones of a straight-tusked elephant in Lower Saxony, Germany, roughly 120,000 years old. The older Schöningen spears show that early Neanderthals were making balanced throwing spears by about 200,000 years ago.

Stone points were glued or bound to shafts with birch tar, which Neanderthals made by heating birch bark. At Umm el Tlel in Syria, a broken Levallois point remains embedded in the neck vertebra of a wild ass, struck with enough force to pierce bone. Their Mousterian toolkit also included scrapers and knives for skinning and butchery.

Most researchers think Neanderthals preferred to get close: thrusting spears, ambushes at river crossings, and driving animals into terrain where they could not escape. Long-range weapons such as spear-throwers and bows are not known from Neanderthal sites.

The "rodeo rider" injury debate

In 1995, Thomas Berger and Erik Trinkaus noted that Neanderthal skeletons show many head and neck injuries, a pattern they compared with modern rodeo riders. It became a popular image of Neanderthals wrestling with large prey. In 2018, a larger study by Judith Beier and colleagues compared 295 Neanderthal cranial elements and found Neanderthal head-injury rates similar to those of early modern humans in Europe. Hunting was dangerous for everyone. Neanderthals were not unusually battered.

Butchering giants

A straight-tusked elephant stood around four metres at the shoulder, larger than a modern African elephant. At Neumark-Nord, cut marks show that Neanderthals removed meat, fat and even the fat pads in the feet. Later work on two other German sites, Gröbern and Taubach, found the same butchery pattern, so this was a regional habit, not a one-off.

The amount of food raises a social question. A typical Neanderthal group is often estimated at around 25 people. Either groups came together in larger numbers at times, or they preserved meat by drying, smoking or rendering fat. The data do not yet show which.

At La Cotte de St Brelade on Jersey, two heaps of mammoth and rhino bones were once read as animals driven off a cliff. Later fieldwork questioned that, finding no clear evidence of a deliberate drive. The heaps may instead reflect repeated butchery at a sheltered spot over time. It is a good example of a dramatic interpretation that has been toned down.

Rivals: lions, hyenas and bears

Neanderthals shared their landscapes with powerful carnivores: the cave lion (Panthera spelaea), the cave hyena, leopards, wolves and the cave bear. Hyenas in particular competed for carcasses and caves.

Sometimes Neanderthals turned the tables. In 2023, Gabriele Russo and colleagues described a cave lion skeleton from Siegsdorf, Germany, about 48,000 years old, with a partial puncture in one rib. Its shape fits a thrust from a wooden spear that entered the lion's belly and stopped against the bone. At Einhornhöhle, cut marks on lion toe bones at least 190,000 years old suggest a pelt was removed with the claws still attached. Together they are the first direct evidence that Neanderthals hunted lions.

Birds, seafood and plants

Neanderthals were not only big-game hunters. At Krapina in Croatia, about 130,000 years ago, eight white-tailed eagle talons carry cut marks and polish consistent with use as jewellery. Sites across Iberia show that raptors and crows were caught, possibly for feathers as well as meat.

On the coast, the evidence is clearer than once thought. At Figueira Brava in Portugal, between about 106,000 and 86,000 years ago, Neanderthals ate mussels, limpets, crabs, fish, seabirds and marine mammals such as seals and dolphins. Vanguard Cave in Gibraltar has similar remains.

Dental tartar adds plants. Starch grains and plant remains trapped in Neanderthal calculus show cooked grasses, seeds, tubers and mushrooms. Our guide to how we know what extinct humans ate explains these methods.

How much meat did they eat?

Nitrogen isotopes in Neanderthal bone collagen sit at levels similar to wolves and hyenas, meaning most of their protein came from large herbivores. Michael Richards and Erik Trinkaus reached that conclusion in 2009 from samples across Europe. Zinc isotopes in tooth enamel from Gabasa in Spain, published in 2022, point the same way.

Isotopes measure protein, though, and plants contribute mainly carbohydrate. A diet can look carnivorous in collagen while still including a lot of plant food. Neanderthals also needed fat as well as lean meat, since eating too much lean protein is harmful. That may explain why they targeted fat prime adults and broke bones for marrow so often.

Why it matters

The animals Neanderthals hunted show a capable, flexible people who tackled the most dangerous game on Earth and adjusted their diet to each region. Their disappearance around 40,000 years ago was not caused by poor hunting. It was more likely linked to small, scattered populations and changing climates. To see where Neanderthals fit among other human species, explore the interactive family tree or compare them directly with Homo sapiens.