The point to which the ancient humans have developed arms to Long -distance hunt is a question of fierce debate among anthropologists. The authors of a new article suggest that our ancestors may have possessed this fatal technology over 300,000 years ago.
To kill an animal from a distance, prehistoric hunters should have developed javelins with certain ballistic properties. Back in the Pleistocene, these weapons consisted of stone points on wooden trees, but very few organic components have survived today, which means that researchers have precious examples of these old spears with which work .
“We have a few wooden spears, the oldest being a fragment of 400,000 years of clacton-on-Sea in England,” said the study co-author Dr Dirk Leder said Iflscience. “So there is Schöningen At 300,000 years old and Lehringen at 120,000 years old, “both in Germany.” That’s it. “”
What is not clear, however, is whether these spears were designed to be thrown away or simply pushed into prey while in the hand of the hunter.
Much more abundant than these wooden elements are the inorganic components of the spears, like stone points which were once seated at the top and remained intact for hundreds of millennia. To discern how these drilling launchers could have been used, researchers often measure their section and then compare these values with ethnographic weapons whose function they know, such as those used by more recent hunters.
Based on this approach, it was recently suggested that the oldest stone points in southern Africa and the Levant were of dimensions similar to the spears of ethnographic push. According to this research, the points that were suitable for launching spears appeared only about 190,000 years agoWith the involvement being that humans living before this date had not yet developed ballistic weapons.
Explaining the problems with this method, however, Leder said that “unlike the lance, the transversal lance (point) cuts grow on average. But it’s just the average. When you look at each spear individually, you end up with a ginormous overlap between the pushing spears, throw away spears and even the spear launchers in some cases. “”
Presenting new analyzes of clacton-on-Sea wooden weapons, Schöningen and Lehringen, the study authors have determined that the transversal approach of the tip “implies too many morphometric rides to be particularly useful as a means of determining the Lance delivery method, “they write in their article. Instead, they declare that “the only measures that have proven to be correlated reliably with the delivery method were the length, the location of the maximum diameter compared to its overall length (…) and the point D ‘balance.”
“We have the advantage of having full wood spears and not just a spearhead,” said Leder. “So we can say something about the balance, which is a very interesting aerodynamic characteristic.”
More specifically, the researchers have found that “whenever you have a launching lance, the point of balance in the lance would be in the half before or the third before.” On the other hand, Leder explained that the thrust of the spears “does not need this aerodynamic characteristic”.
Above all, the authors found that the balance point of all the Schöningen spears was located in the front half, which makes them adapted to the throw. Conversely, the balancing point of Lehringen’s lance was backwards, which suggests that he would not have made decent projectiles and was therefore more likely to have been used as a push lance.
This conclusion is safeguarded by experiences in which experts in formed weapons have tested replicas of Schöningen spears, noting that they were more effective in penetrating horse hiding places when thrown away than during the push. According to the authors, these results cannot categorically prove that the Old weapons of 300,000 De Schöningen was used as javelots, but simply demonstrate that the technological hunting capacity with projectiles was in place at that time.
“We are quite confident on the basis of this data – no balance – that we are dealing with launching on Schöningen, and that the launch has existed for at least 300,000 years, and probably much longer,” said Leder .
The study is published in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.