The Age That Was Wood

At Abric Romaní, a rock shelter near Barcelona, wooden remains offer a less lopsided picture of Neanderthal technology. Reporting in New Scientist on October 7, James Woodford describes a systematic review of nearly 600 wooden objects dated to between 40,000 and 62,000 years ago. Researchers identified 13 as pieces used or made by Neanderthals. The reported finds include spears, tray-like objects and an unusually shaped object interpreted as a possible club.

The striking result is not that the Stone Age needs a replacement label. It is that an archive can preserve one material so much better than another that survival begins to look like cultural importance.

When the wood leaves its shape behind

According to Woodford’s account, excavations at the site since the 1980s have recovered several kinds of evidence: charred objects, preserved timber and imprints in travertine. This calcium-carbonate-rich rock can preserve patterns of wood grain after the timber itself has decayed.

The tree has left the meeting. Its impression remains in the minutes.

That mechanism matters. These are not all intact wooden implements waiting politely in a cave. Nor are nearly 600 wooden finds equivalent to nearly 600 manufactured tools. The reporting says most of the material consists of trunks, branches, twigs, roots and accumulations of firewood. Distinguishing deliberately worked or used pieces from the wider collection is part of the research, not a detail to sweep behind the headline.

Researcher Maria Gema Chacón singles out two spears as evidence of woodworking skill: selecting suitable material and shaping long, straight shafts into pointed weapons. Other interpretations are less settled. Woodford describes a mysterious tripod, possible structural poles and trays whose likely utility is compared with carrying vessels. The club-like object has a narrow handle and an enlarged, asymmetrical head, but its description should not quietly harden into proof of how it was wielded.

Together, the finds suggest a repertoire extending beyond the stone implements that dominate familiar pictures of Neanderthal life. They do not establish the numerical share of everyday technology made from wood.

A larger toolkit, not a larger claim

The phrase “as much a wooden age as a stone age” is therefore best read as a challenge to perspective, not a measured ratio. How much wood people used, for which tasks, and how representative this shelter was remain different questions.

In Woodford’s reporting, Natural History Museum researcher Chris Stringer welcomes the wider technological repertoire while stressing the limits: this is one site, in one area, over one span of time. A remarkable window is still a window, not a continent-wide inventory.

The full journal paper was not accessible for this article; the findings and researchers’ interpretations above come from New Scientist’s retrieved report. That supports describing what the team reports, not independently endorsing every proposed object function.

The coherenceist lesson is practical: understand the filter before treating its output as the world. Here the filter is physical preservation. Correcting for it means looking for perishable technologies and testing their traces—not filling every absence with an attractive story.

The stone tools remain real, important evidence. They simply need not carry the whole account of ingenuity alone. A piece of wood, sometimes present only as the shape it left behind, lets a more various everyday life come into view. The past has not become less impressive. It has acquired a few more things people could carry.