Neanderthals deliberately collected and placed the skulls of animals with horns and antlers in a cave in what is now Spain, suggesting that these extinct human relatives had complex cultural practices more than 43,000 years ago, a new study finds.
The Des-Cubierta cave in central Iberia was originally discovered in 2009. In 2023, researchers announced an unusual discovery assortment of 35 skulls of large mammals inside the cave. Most of the jawbones were missing, but all the skulls were from horned or antlered species steppe bison and bison. Over 1,400 stone tools were uncovered on the same level, all in the Mousterian style typical of Neanderthals.
“At first glance, the deposit looks chaotic,” claims the first author of the study Lucía Villaescusa Fernándezdoctoral researcher in archeology at the University of Alcalá in Spain, told Live Science in an email. “What initially appeared to be a haphazard accumulation of materials turned out to preserve a clear record of both geological processes and human activity,” she said.
Cave experienced many rock falls in the millennia following its use, so Villaescusa Fernández and her team teased out the role of these disturbances as opposed to Neanderthal activity. This confirmed that Neanderthals collected animal skulls for long periods during particularly cold periods between 135,000 and 43,000 years ago, according to a study published Jan. 3 in the journal. Archaeological and anthropological sciences.
“This distinction is crucial in archeology because understanding past human behavior requires first identifying which parts of the archaeological record were created by humans and which were shaped by nature,” said Villaescusa Fernández.
To fill this gap, Villaescusa Fernández and her colleagues carefully mapped the location of all the archaeological remains. They then compared the distribution of stone fragments with that of animal bones and stone tools. It was clear that the bones had been placed in the cave on purpose. “These materials had different origins and were not introduced into the cave by the same processes,” said Villaescusa Fernández.
Although the time scale cannot be directly measured and the exact duration of the practice remains uncertain, the team also found that animal skulls were placed in specific areas of the cave repeatedly over long periods of time. This suggests that the practice could have been maintained for generations and was not directly tied to economic or subsistence needs, Villaescusa Fernández said.
Exactly why Neanderthals collected skulls is not clear, but the selection, treatment and placement of skulls of horned animals in a cave they did not live in “highlights their capacity for cultural practices that are not directly related to survival,” Villaescusa Fernández said. “This has important implications for how we understand Neanderthal societies, particularly in terms of cultural transmission and shared traditions,” she added.
“Too often, discussions of Neanderthal symbolism rely on flimsy evidence or optimistic interpretations,” Ludovic Slimákarchaeologist at the University of Toulouse in France and author of “Naked Neanderthal” (Penguin, 2024), who was not involved in the study, told Live Science via email. “Here, the authors take a more grounded approach and test whether the spatial organization of the remains can be explained by natural processes alone,” he said.
Slimak said the study’s findings add new evidence the Neanderthal Symbolism Debate. “Rather than asking whether Neanderthals were ‘symbolic like us,’ we should ask what kinds of meaningful behavior they developed on their own terms. This site suggests that Neanderthal worlds of meaning existed, but they may have been structured very differently from Homo sapienshe said.
Villaescusa, L., Baquedano, E., Martín-Perea, DM, Márquez, B., Galindo-Pellicena, M. Á., Cobo-Sánchez, L., Ortega, AI, Huguet, R., Laplana, C., Ortega, MC, Gómez, Aláncí, S Moc.. Álvarez-Lao, DJ, García-González, R., Rodríguez, L., Pérez-González, A., & Arsuaga, JL. (2026). Towards a formation model of Neanderthal symbolic accumulation of herbivorous skulls: Spatial patterns shaped by rockfall dynamics in Level 3 of Des-Cubierta Cave (Lozoya Valley, Madrid, Spain). Archaeological and anthropological sciences18(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-025-02382-5
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