Schöningen Spear

Origins

For most of the twentieth century archaeologists argued about whether early humans were true hunters or opportunistic scavengers, picking over the kills of lions and hyenas. The question was hard to settle because wood rarely survives, and the stone tools that do survive cannot say what they were used for. Schöningen settled much of it. From 1994 the archaeologist Hartmut Thieme excavated deposits exposed by a brown-coal mine near the town of Schöningen, in Lower Saxony, Germany, and found, sealed in waterlogged lake-shore mud, a group of wooden spears lying among thousands of animal bones, most of them from wild horses. The finds were published in Nature in 1997 and changed the picture of the Lower Palaeolithic at a stroke. The site was long dated to around 300,000 years ago; recent dating studies have argued for a younger age of about 200,000 years, which is still far older than any other complete wooden weapon.

Design & Construction

Each spear was made from a single slender young tree, most of them spruce and one of pine. The maker felled the tree, stripped the bark and side branches, and shaped the point from the base of the trunk, where the wood is hardest and densest — the same choice a modern bowyer or tool-maker would make. The shafts taper toward the back, and the finished spears range from about 1.8 to 2.5 meters long. Thieme noted that their greatest thickness and weight lie in the front third of the shaft, as on a modern competition javelin, and argued that they were made for throwing; others have stressed that they would serve just as well for thrusting. Experiments in 2019 with trained javelin throwers using replicas showed that they could hit a target at up to twenty meters with enough force to kill, which is at least consistent with throwing. Alongside the spears lay a short double-pointed stick, perhaps a throwing club, and stone tools used to cut up the carcasses.

Combat Use

The Schöningen spears were hunting weapons, not weapons of war, but they are the ancestors of every spear that followed. The bone bed around them holds the remains of more than twenty horses of an extinct species, killed and butchered on the lake shore, perhaps in a single planned hunt in which a group drove the herd against the water. That required cooperation, planning and the foresight to make weapons in advance — abilities once thought to be unique to modern humans. Later hunters would add stone points, as on the Clovis Point, and launch their spears with the Atlatl and eventually the bow, such as the Holmegaard Bow.

Legacy

The Schöningen spears are the oldest complete weapons known and among the most important finds in Palaeolithic archaeology. They are conserved and shown at the paläon research and experience center built beside the site, which opened in 2013. Together with the Flint Hand Axe, they show that the long human story of weapons began with wood and stone in the hands of people who were not yet Homo sapiens, and they remain the starting point for any history of the spear.