Animal resources have been part of hominin diets since around 2.5 million years ago, with sharp-edged stone tools facilitating access to carcasses. How exactly hominins acquired animal prey and how hunting strategies varied through time and space is far from clear. The oldest possible hunting weapons known from the archaeological record are 300,000 to 400,000-year-old sharpened wooden staves. These may have been used as throwing and/or close-range thrusting spears, but actual data on how such objects were used are lacking, as unambiguous lesions caused by such weapon-like objects are unknown for most of human prehistory. Here, we report perforations observed on two fallow deer skeletons from Neumark-Nord, Germany, retrieved during excavations of 120,000-year-old lake shore deposits with abundant traces of Neanderthal presence. Detailed studies of the perforations, including micro-computed tomography imaging and ballistic experiments, demonstrate that they resulted from the close-range use of thrusting spears. Such confrontational ways of hunting require close cooperation between participants, and over time may have shaped important aspects of hominin biology and behaviour.

west. Our study offers a local framework, but its Pleistocene landscape record has regional significance. Most of all, it forms a much-needed basis for future, detailed studies on the build-up of the hominin site of Trinil, its fossil assemblages and numerical ages.

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Lacustrine localities were attractive environments for Palaeolithic hominins, since they provide a large and broad spectrum of resources. Moreover, they are excellent archives that allow for high-resolution environmental, chronological and archaeological analyses. However, these deposits are often subject to complex formation and post-depositional factors, including water-related processes. Evaluating the influence of hydrological processes in site formation is thus essential to more accurately reconstruct the duration, intensity and types of hominin behaviour within these environments. In this paper we present the orientation analysis of archaeological material from the Last Interglacial site Neumark-Nord 2, Germany. Orientation analysis was done using GIS to calculate the orientation of artefact from digital plans of the excavation surface, which were subsequently tested using circular statistics. The results of the orientation analysis are compared with a hydrological model to check the relation between preferred orientations and reconstructed areas of water flow and accumulation. Results suggest that low-energy hydrological processes could have affected certain areas of the find-bearing deposits at Neumark-Nord 2 but, overall, there is no evidence for either high-energy hydrological processes or a significant movement of parts of the archaeological assemblage