More than 43,000 years ago, Neanderthals spent centuries collecting animal skulls in caves. But archaeologists don’t know why

Neanderthals intentionally collected and placed skulls of horned animals in caves in what is now Spain, suggesting that these extinct human relatives had complex cultural practices more than 43,000 years ago, a new study has found.

Des Cubierta Cave in the central Iberian Peninsula was first discovered in 2009. In 2023, researchers announced the rare discovery of a complete set of 35 large mammal skulls inside the cave. Most of the jaw bones were missing, but all of the skulls belonged to some species with horns or horns, such as steppe bison or aurochs. More than 1,400 stone tools were unearthed at the same level, all of the Mousterian style typical of Neanderthals.

“At first glance, the deposits appear chaotic,” study lead author Lucia Villaescusa Fernández, a postdoctoral researcher in archeology at the University of Alcalá in Spain, told Live Science via email. “What initially appeared to be a chaotic accumulation of material turned out to preserve a clear record of both geological processes and human activity,” she said.

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The cave suffered numerous rockfalls over the millennia of use, so Villaescusa-Fernández and her team teased out the role of these disturbances separately from Neanderthal activity. The findings, published January 3 in the journal Archeology and Anthropology Science, confirm that Neanderthals collected animal skulls over long periods of time, during particularly cold periods between 135,000 and 43,000 years ago.

“This distinction is essential in archaeology, because to understand past human behavior, we must first identify which parts of the archaeological record were created by humans and which parts were shaped by nature,” Villaescusa-Fernández said.

To fill this gap, Villaescusa Fernández and colleagues carefully mapped the locations of all archaeological sites. We then compared the distribution of rockfall debris with the distribution of animal bones and stone tools. It became clear that the bones were intentionally placed inside the cave. “These materials have different origins and were not brought into the cave through the same process,” Villascousa-Fernández said.

The researchers also found that the animal’s skull was repeatedly placed in a specific location in the cave over an extended period of time, although the time scale could not be directly measured and the exact duration of the training remains unknown. This suggests that the practice was sustained over generations and may not have been directly tied to economic or subsistence needs, Villascousa-Fernández said.

It’s unclear exactly why Neanderthals collected skulls, but their selection, processing and placement of horned animal skulls in caves where they didn’t live “highlights their capacity for cultural practices not directly related to survival,” Villaescusa-Fernández said. “This has important implications for how we understand Neanderthal society, especially in terms of cultural transmission and shared traditions,” she added.

“Too often, discussions about Neanderthal symbolism rely on weak evidence and optimistic interpretations,” Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse in France and author of The Naked Neanderthal (Penguin, 2024), who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. “This time, the authors take a more grounded approach and examine whether the spatial organization of the ruins can be explained solely by natural processes,” he said.

Slimak said the findings add new evidence to the debate over Neanderthal symbolism. “Rather than asking whether Neanderthals were ‘symbolic like us,’ we should ask what meaningful actions they developed in their own unique way. This site suggests that Neanderthal worlds of meaning existed, but they may have been structured very differently from the Homo sapiens world,” he said.

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