Well not sticks and stones exactly. After many generations have bred out the catastrophic mutagenic ailments from a slowly increasing population, some form of mechanical weapons would be developed from the limited residual technological leftovers from pre-world war 3. And we're dumb enough as a species not to have finally learned from such an incident of near self extinction, only to repeat the cycle. Our anthropocentric irrational narcissism is what will finish us off. Cynicism? Nope, just aware of the blatantly obvious. Hopeful? Yes, that we might develop the maturity to drag ourselves out of our primitive cradle.
You can't have a world war without international coordination. If people are using sticks and stones to fight then they're not going to be communicating internationally to coordinate warfare.
If we bomb ourselves back to the stoneage in WWIII, we wouldn't be capable of waging another world war. Not until we build back to a state of great enough sophistication. What a great mind...Look into the think-tank behind old Bert.
Hawaiians were using wood tipped, barbed, spears for combat up until the early 1800's. The weight of the spear with its momentum make it deadly, even with a blunt tip. We throw them during makahiki games, and a proficient person can throw many yards accurately as well as catch spears thrown at them (seriously, look it up).
I like your comment. Thanks for the knowledge. Then the British empire came along with canons and muskets and wiped out lots of indigenous people. I’m from Scotland. Peace
@@CardinalKaos I teach Hawaiian history, and honestly, I didn't believe some of the stories...at first. Captain Vancouver wrote in his official journal that Kamehameha caught 4/6 spear thrown at him, parried one, and dodged the last. They still have Lua training here on Maui. I've seen guys do it, while moving forward. It's nuts.
Should be noted also that Hawaiians were also canibals up to the artival of Westerners The same as most Pacific islanders....they found the palms of victims the most delicious to eat. Stone age cultures were an anacronism up until the 1800s.....are an anomily of humankind caused by isolation.
One of the fascinating things about the Schöningen spears is what they tell us about how well the makers understood the material properties of the wood they used. The base of a tree/sapling is stronger, more dense wood and more resistant to damage as a result. These spears were made specifically to take advantage of this, with the proximal or striking point made from the base of the sapling, and the distal end the lighter, more flexible wood, which helps in flight and in avoiding shaft breakage upon impact. This indicates that they understood the material properties of the wood very well, and made these spears specifically maximize their effectiveness in light of the material properties.
Yup. They weren't dumb. Children that grew up, well...like me, figure these things out. The people from this time were masters of their environment (as we are today, in a sense). I believe that the really astounding achievements have been lost to time. For me...acting impressed that they knew how to utilize the simple materials at their disposal, is an insult to their intelligence. I don't mean to cause argument. I am just stating my opinion.
That could also mean that they were capable of making other things out of wood. It's a bit of a shame that none of that is ever found. Wood would be the easiest material to express their culture one would think.
@@telebubba5527 Of course they were capable of making other things, they were as intelligent as we are they just weren't as technologically advanced. They had their Einsteins and Michelangelos too.
Makes sense that they’d still use just wood spears, even once they started making flint or rock tipped spears. The wooden spears are easier to make and would work just fine for quite a few things, could save the harder to make flint or rock tipped spear for when they’d really need it then. You wouldn’t want to damage your good spear or lose the rock tip, when you can use an easier to make wooden spear instead. 🤷♀️
Excellent "point" ( no pun intended). Also, in training children, wooden spears would make more sense because they were easier to make, resharpen, and if broken, easier to replace.
That's the one thing I think about. When stuck in the wilderness, don't tie your knife to a stick. If you throw it for hunting, the knife might get stuck in the prey and you only have one knife. Use the knife to make the stick itself pointy, because that way you can have as many spears as you need.
How did the tool suit the purpose? These spears would be good for spear fishing. In shallow calm water where fish were abundant. A flint spear tip wrapped in gut or plant string wouldn’t last very long getting wet.
@@mattjessup8376 Yes, they were building the Box we are supposed to think outside of! A stone from the ground can be a deadly weapon, for a small animal or a distraction for a larger one, a curved stick makes a boomerang that will fly a good distance and kill something and took ten minutes to carve, with a sharp rock. Everything is a tool if you have the mind to see it and that means smarts! Those old Homos were plenty smart, smart enough to build a society out of the wilderness, even before the invention of the Cell Phone.
11:38 "Why they left them behind [the spears at Schöningen]" seems pretty obvious to me. She mentioned that the area was a lake shore, which is where big game come to drink. Hunters likely ambushed game at the shoreline, and the spears that missed their prey simply torpedoed into the water and buried themselves in the silt/clay.
Or they came to this site at a certain time of the year to hunt the big game there - and didn't want to carry around their whole arsenal all year, so they buried them into the ground to hide them and dig them out again next year. Then something happened and they never returned.
The sort of trees need to make wooden spears is fairly common worldwide, while the kind of stone needed to make durable points is somewhat rare and also more difficult to find. This alone suggests that wooden spears would remain in use after stone working becomes available.
Also when the spear gets stuck in the animal, you'll lose the stone (or later metal) tip. When the same tool could be use to sharpen more sticks into spears.
You need to lose the whole "worldwide" idea. Here I Australia we don't Have the same types of trees that grow in the Europe, North America etc. There is a Lot more to The World than Europe, Eurasia and North America.
@@stephanieyee9784 what do you mean?? Australia has plenty of trees suitable for making spear out of. He never said it was just Europe and North America...
We play with their skulls. But these were living creatures who loved, who hated, who mated, raised children, had lives of happiness and sorrow, danger and peace. I think it's important to remember that.
I've seen a video of a young man in the Balkans, wearing traditional clothing, spear a boar with a wooden spear. His dogs were worrying the boar and the boar ran straight at him. He simply braced his spear against the ground and held it pointing towards the running boar. The boar ran into the spear, impaling himself. It's like the boar did not recognize the spear as being dangerous. The boar was focused on attacking the man. The spear impaled the boar all the way through and the man picked the boar up and threw the boar down so the boar was on his back. The boar was still alive and squealing loudly. The young man drew a large knife from his belt and stabbed the boar in the neck and the boar soon died. It was an impressive sight. The man seemed to be very experienced with spear hunting boar.
@@jackbehling5694 Sweetie there are no tigers to hunt in South America. Maybe you are thinking of the jaguar? Nobody is hunting them either. Too elusive,
I'd be more interested to see them test actual replicas because the samples we saw were too straight! Maybe 'too straight' is not accurate, what i mean is, the originals weren't as straight as the ones on the desk.
@@Moamanly But the spears may have originally been straight and became warped after thousands of years in the ground, with changes in ground movement, pressure and water over time. With the high resolution CT scans she mentioned I am sure they could tell due to the wood grain if these were originally straight or not
@@carolyncopeland2722 Yeah that's an excellent point you make, it would certainly make sense, for an effective missile that was used over such a long period, to be straight.
The most successful hunting tool is not so much the spear itself, it’s group tactics. The plan was not just to sneak up on the beast and then throw spears, it was to position hunters where the beast was likely to run when surprised by the women & children who scare the beast in the intended direction (into the waiting spear chucking range and spear jabbing range.
If you can get one deep spear wound into the belly or leg of a mammoth the animal will die, it’ll take a few days though but presumably it’s pack will have to leave it behind and eventually it will die.
You might be confusing hunting strategy and hunting tool. The strategy you describe and which undoubtedly led to a higher kill rate would be worthless without a tool unless you plan on choking the beasts you speak of.
In hunting wild boar, didn't they have beaters to scare the animals down paths and have person with a spear planted so that when the boar attacked it could run onto the spear. More in medieval times and probably with tipped spears.
In case anyone hadn't realised it, Clacton-on-Sea would not have been 'on-sea' 400,000 years ago, but in the middle of a continuous land mass from what is now the British Isles across to the Central European Plain. Doggerland no longer exists as the North Sea drowned it relatively recently.
It occurs to me that if you throw a spear like this at an elephant (from a short distance, these are heavy) it won't go in very far, but if the elephant charges you with one end of the spear penetrating just enough to stay put, and the other (also sharp) end of the spear on the ground, the elephant will do the work for you and impale itself. This might mean that hunting large, aggressive animals is actually easier than hunting smaller, less aggressive animals.
They probably used teamwork to scare the beast towards guys hiding and ready to do exactly that. A panicked animal with lots of momentum could really get impaled. Also when surrounding a wounded beast I picture them charging/surrounding from 2 or 3 directions then as they simultaneously poke the beast, they jam the back end down into the ground. Each spear penetrating the hide upward with a 45 degree angle and the back end of the spear locked into the ground, the beast could not push against the spear. With 3 spears evenly spaced around the beast, it can not move without impaling itself. After it’s trapped like this, the hunters would make the kill.
Never seen this channel in my feed before. Not even three minutes in and I’m subscribed. Immediately into knowledgeable and qualified person giving a very thorough explanations and descriptions. Love it
I have three different examples of hardwood tipped long arrows (1.5m) from Papua New Guinea they look and are scary effective in both hunting and warfare.
I mean, skin only is that hard. Once you get over that hardness, there is no increase in effectiveness anymore. The only thing that makes the projectile deadlier at that point is to hurl (shoot) it with more speed or to make it heavier and shoot it at the same speed. Therefor, hardwood arrow = fine.
@@johannageisel5390A pointed stick is not very effective at killing an animal unless they’re poisoned. A broad head type tip cuts blood vessels whereas a pointed tip will usually push them aside.
The phenomenon that different levels of technology exist next to each other (like the fully wooden spears and the stone-tipped spears they talk about around minute 20) is also known from other time periods. For example, the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle has a bronze arrow tip and a stone arrow tip, both from the Bronze Age. The tips are of the same size and shape (very finely made, about the size of a larger fingernail). I assume it has to do with availability of material. If you had access to the better stuff, you could use that, but if you maybe didn't have any of that at the time, you would fall back onto the earlier technology and make do with that. Or maybe if you can do with the easier/cheaper method, you will not undertake the effort of using the more costly version. A wooden spear is made more quickly than a stone-tipped spear, so it's "cheaper" in time. And bronze was expensive, so a stone arrow tip was cheaper than a bronze one.
Stone spear and arrow tips tend to be single use, they break off, often inside the body of the target, helping it to die faster, but meaning you have to make a new tip, or repair an old one, each time. Not to with a bronze tip. As for the stack of wooden "Spear/digging stick" shafts, they could simply be waiting for their tips.
A pointy stick is also good for uses other than poking animals and people. You can use it to dig or carry or drag or stack them together and make a temporary shelter. They don't have to be thrown or thrust; you can plant one end like pikemen receiving a cavalry charge or how Japanese hunters would defend against a bear. It's a useful all round outdoors tool, just as an axe or a knife is.
They obviously must travel in groups and the lake was a seasonal habitat. The spears may have been left behind at the site because they had made more than they used and decided to leave them for when they return next season. I’m sure the clan members would feel good about knowing the lake site is set up for their return, waiting for them. Probably also some kind of shelter waiting for their return too.
A less happy thought is that they made enough spears for the clan but not all of them survived the hunts. The spears of the fallen were perhaps left in honour of them or they were limited in ehat thdy could carry.
Whilst Dr Milks correctly refers to these spear users as hominids, Tristan however refers to them as humans as does the title of this video. These artefacts are not human artefacts and it is somewhat human centric to claim they are. As 400,000 years ago Humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) did not exist on the planet. There are multiple branches of Hominids and not all hominids are the ancestors of humans. I am experienced in the handling and use of numerous hand weapons. As an observation the length and thickness of the spears shown in the video are very similar to the dimensions (although not the materials) of medieval thrusting spears. Although how Neanderthals and Homo Heidelbergensis would use them remains a matter of conjecture particularly in view of their different physiology when compared with Homo Sapiens Sapiens. 😀😀😀
Well, there is still a bit of a debate whether we should count Homo neanderthalensis and other such groups as "human" or not. The word "human" can be used in a narrower sense for "Homo sapiens" and in a broader sense for "any hominid that had an intelligence and capability comparable to our own".
Which occurred first, the spear or the hiking staff? Did early man started to use a stick to help him or her walk and then found could be used as a spear?
Would a wooden spear leave identifiable marks on bones? They could kill an animal by penetrating a blood vessel, or vital organs (heart, lung), causing bleeding, shock, or loss of function without cutting any bones encountered. Any impact damage (say skull fracture or even rib breaks) would probably be indistinguishable from blunt instruments like clubs.
Highly unlikely as wood is softer than bone. The tip would deform before the bone would. It is to cause flesh wound and get it to bleed out. As you said, the skull and rib cage would be the only bones to get damaged, maybe the shoulder blade. It would look like any other blunt force trauma though, if it was the skull. A rib cage might show it as a round hole, but that would've been eaten and the bones discarded, or eaten by dogs.
@@Yvolve Sounds plausible but is untrue, sure the tip would deform but given enough force a wooden spear tip would definitely break bone. By the way, you know what's also softer than bone? Lead
@@JerehmiaBoaz Given the shape of most bones, it would not break it, but have it be a glancing blow. You'd have to hit it exactly right, or it won't break a bone. You know what travels at 100's of meters per second and therefore have the immense potential kinetic energy in a tiny object? A bullet. You know what disintegrates on impact? A bullet. You know what stays intact on impact? A wooden spear because you can't throw it with enough force for it to explode. The fact you compare these, shows you have very little understanding of what is going on.
@@Yvolve Sorry but that just isn't true, physically speaking it depends on the pressure generated (dependent on speed and mass of the spear and surface area of its tip) and the tensile strength and elasticity of both the spear tip and the bone. The fact that you think that a "hard" material can't be destroyed by a "soft" material proves you're operating on intuition. (Kinetic energy is 0.5m * v^2 so an 8 gram bullet traveling at 300 m/s has exactly the same kinetic energy as a 1.8 kg spear traveling at 20 m/s.)
@@JerehmiaBoaz No, bones aren't flat, so unless you hit it so the point is perfectly perpendicular to the surface it is impacting, it will glance. The chances of hitting a bone perfectly like that is near impossible. If you read my first comment in its entirety. you would've seen I said that the skull, rib cage and shoulder blade would get destroyed because of the shape. All bone. The fact you assume that I think what you assume, shows you can't think outside of your own very limited experience, knowledge and reasoning, as you need me to think a certain way for your "argument" to hold up. I'm specifically talking about thrown wooden spears and bone, nothing else, yet you imply I think this goes for every combination which is similar. You might think this way, hence the idiotic comparison to bullets, but I don't. A wooden arrow, despite being light and quite fragile, will easily go through skin and can definitely break bones, because of the potential kinetic energy the bow imparted on the arrow. It is also moving so fast, the point doesn't have time to move out of the way, unlike a thrown spear.
@27:31-27:41: Mentions Congo, which is in Central Africa, but shows an image of Maasai warriors near the Ngorongoro Crater, which is in Tanzania, East Africa.
Fascinating. I have often thought about what I'd do if I suddenly awoke naked and alone in some prehistoric era. I task myself with getting a long, strong stick to jab with and a few throwing sized rocks. Then shelter and food.
If you are bipedal with hands you are going to carry a spear, because if you don't you will become a predator's meal. This almost certainly goes back a long time. Consider Lucy: a little over three feet tall and walking around in an environment with lions, hyenas, and leopards, among others. Human bipedality makes you slow, too slow to run away from predators. However, bipedality means you can carry a sharpened stick, making it dangerous for predators to attack you, especially if you travel in groups. Predators don't take risks it they don't have to. A group of 3-5 foot tall apes might look tasty to a lion, but those sticks... I imagine if you went back two million years to East Africa, you would never see Hominins wandering around without spears.
Bone tips are a sharpenable hard material that could be used on spears. Many examples are recorded in history. Also, succesful hunters would have lots of bones.
Indigenous Australian are still using wooden spears, with fire hardened tips on traditional hunts. Selecting and shaping a sapling has significant meaning. Not surprisingly from one of the world’s longest continuous culture, and worth looking at for greater insight.
Really cool composite spears are made by some tribes. The shaft is more like a light cane, and then there is a hardwood tip that both weights that end and is more robust and keeps a sharper edge. There are thrown with a woomera (although that name is used by different tribes in central Australia) otherwise known as an atlatle or spear chucker.
I guarantee EVERY SINGLE HUMAN, pre-human or near relative carried wooden spears. But because they all rotted away ... science takes that to mean "there were no spears" during those periods. BS. Early man couldn't have made it in the wilds without at least long, sharp sticks.
I would reckon purely wooden spears persisted after stone-tipped spears were developed because stone-tipped spears are only marginally more effective then purely wooden spears, way more time/effort consuming to make, and more prone to snapping after a single use. In short, stone-tipped spears offer marginal improvement for far more resources consumed. It was still very useful to have purely wooden spears as backup.
Finally a Neanderthal recreation that isnt clearly biased towards some racial ideological agenda. Much appreciated. Why would a Neanderthal have Germanic features as opposed to Basque? Indo-European vs non-Indo-European. Cartoon Propaganda vs OBSERVABLE facts
History Hit can you combine 1 indian bull elephant, 1 snake, two spears, 2 handfans, 1 wall, 1 rope, and 4 trees in real life called Blind Men's Elephant and also does Blind Men's Elephant exist in real life?
Would extra development of right arm musculature fix points not suggest a throwing motion development, implying spear throwing? If medieval bowmen can be identified from the skeletons then why not Neanderthal spear throwers?
Sometimes you need a $3000 Tikka in 7mm 08, and sometimes you only need a Cooey single shot 22lr. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, sometimes the hunt requires something powerful and high end, sometimes the simple and old is enough and it’s cheaper. A stone tipped spear is much harder to make and a missed shot can easily break it.
I've learnt to nap rocks 60 years ago in my 20 s I live in the mountains for a little over 2 years . My walking stick I used every day one end was sharp an fire hardened. In the end I used it for small game ...birds spearing fish ECT. Also my finer spear points were made in the winter while hold up in a cave for the winter
A very uncomfortable discussion about woman’s participation in hunting. It’s known that children and women hunted small game and birds. But it’s too high of a societal risk to have women in a small group hunt larger dangerous game. And there were many other activities that needed their attention and time. Children, cooking, preserving food, making clothes, gathering plants for food and medicine, and so forth. Division of labor is a principal of this kind of lifestyle.
My question is, were spears initially walking sticks that were intentionally honed after being cut to size, then fit to the person’s gait, and shaved to modify the overall weight and shape to the person’s liking, for both throwing and walking with? They were obviously hunting tools, and a vast majority of hunting is tracking; and a walking stick is a nice tool for navigating a variety of terrain. I am just saying, the way spears are held in reconstructions and artwork really strikes me as driving a narrative that paints our ancestors in a way that doesn’t indicate that they cared about how they looked, or how simultaneously strong and agile they were. Most animals groom and hominins are obviously invested in being attractive and have style for that ancient cultural moment probably had some interesting beauty regimens. The imagery instead making these people look sloppy, aggressive and dumb. This wholly flattens what life would have actually looked like for these peoples. Humans had a lot of time on their hands before we started farming… messing about and playing with what was available, I am sure the dudes wandering around vast territories, tracking food, and making hunting strategies or just hanging about with their mates, they would probably want to customize their tools just so. Think about how little kids pick sticks, they have to be just right and some kids like to have a bunch of sticks and try them out and others like to choose just the perfect stick. You can’t tell me that there wasn’t some healthy and unhealthy competition happening between siblings and mates back in the day, driving experimentation and variation in the early tools made by hominins.
I think evidence is being bent to fit modern ideas with regards to the size the spears, when speaking to it being evidence of female's hunting with males, which I'm sure happened at some point. Though I think we need to stop injecting modern ideals on the past, it's much more likely to have been adolescent males out with older males learning the craft, who would have needed smaller spears (just like today you have junior sized bows and firearms). Also, back in this period a tribe of people would not risk their young females hunting and being killed, you have to remember that you can lose most of the males in a tribe if something were to happen (like a hunting accident) and still repopulate, the opposite is not true, making them usually too valuable to lose. To highlight my points and give some reference, you need only look at surviving hunter-gatherer tribes today and mostly women are not regularly taught to hunt or taken on hunts and most of the ones that do, are not there to actively participate but to help with the kill and maybe do a little gathering in area farther from the safety of the village.
Why wooden and stone-tipped spears alongside each other? Balance. It is (well, not easy, but well within reach of early peoples) to make balanced wooden spears. Overweight the tip, especially by tying a rock to it, and it will tumble as soon as it leaves the hand.
If I understood correctly, humankind began to use flint points and stone tools about 230,000 years ago, and the earliest known points/tools were discovered at sites in Europe and the Near East. Doesn't this push the dawn of proper humans back to a time earlier than often stated? If so, wouldn't the earliest artifacts be in Africa?
Wooden spears are going to have a use even to people who know how to work stone. If you're a hunter-gatherer you have to use the materials to hand. Good stone isn't available everywhere. Different environments have different geology and in many places the bedrock is a long way down, or the predominant forms of rock are too soft to make useful tools, or too tough to be worked easily. Nomadic people may have picked up supplies of stones when they passed through an area that had them, and they may have traded with other groups that had stone to spare. But it would always be sensible to be able to make weapons and tools from a variety of materials so you can still hunt if you don't have any good rocks nearby.
14:25 If we look at the societies of hunter-gatherers still existing or known to us today, it is equally unlikely that our female ancestors actively participated in hunting. On the one hand, for physiological reasons, and on the other, the protection of childbearing individuals in a hostile and inhospitable environment guaranteed the preservation and continued existence of the rarefied groups as a whole.
I had no idea as to the size of the spears! They are huge and I suspect the mussels required to throw them effectively was SIGNIFICANT! Incredible video! It’s a good day when I learn something new and today was a very good day!
@@kellyharbeson18 I have indeed thrown the javelin competitively. The frontal centre of gravity gives these away as javelins. As for them being poor weapons, well, for some reason the Egyptians used them extensively and they were a military superpower. And this poor weapon was used decisively in the battle of Lechaeum
@@kellyharbeson18 they were used in warfare, by people who knew what they were doing, and who were quite literally staking their lives on how good they were. And they practiced a lot. And if YOU have thrown javelin competitively, you know that you are going for distance and nothing else, which is not the same as throwing javelins at a bunch of people with the aim of killing them. Furthermore, the English longbow certainly IS a precision weapon at shorter range, while being an excellent saturation weapon too. Cave paintings show that people used throwing javelins extensively for hunting.
I think I heard they drove them down narrow passages and a posse of hominins went 'psycho on them' (my quote). Oh they used to drive big things off cliffs too. Your idea is defo plausible imo.
Too much effort. You're burning more calories than you'll end up getting from the animal. You'd have to dig the hole, put the spears in, find an animal, which you could've killed with the spear you put in the hole, than drive it to and into the hole, to die falling on the spear you could've killed it with if you didn't dig a hole and left it in there. Why go through this effort when you can stalk an animal and kill it from a distance with a spear that flies like a modern-day javelin?
These spears are amazingly multi-purpose in their simplicity. Use the narrower end as a lance, and the thicker end as a weighted spear. You could even discipline teenagers or unruly livestock with a quick whack.
I wonder how many times someone has found a, "pointy stuck," and had no idea that they were holding a spear from half-a-million years ago? If you don't know what you're looking at it's just a pointy stick, isn't it? Not so many people have the training to recognize one, do they?
Why is there a debate about whether it was thrown or thrusted? What would your action be if you had that tool now? You'd either throw or thrust it, based on the situation, right? Tried to reproduce it for testing? Were all of you born adults, with no chance to experience childhood?
It took half way through the interview to confirm my suspicions that we were looking at reproductions, and to finally discuss how they were made and used. The question remains where are the original spears and what do they look like. The reproductions look very straight and perfectly shaped and rather heavy.
@@soulless435 Yes, barely mentioned, but it should have been said up front and I can only assume the brief glimpse of something or other may have been the originals. They should have been revealed in detail.
There’s Turkish Homo Erectus and German Homo Heidelbergensis bones been found with tuberculosis scars. TB is a bovine disease and it’s possible that the infections came from living close to some form of cattle. How close? Perhaps having cattle living over winter in the host’s home similar to what still happens in parts of Asia or perhaps from corralling cattle or having them in an open range. Cattle in the home or corralled would require winter feeding and presumably if this did happen the early humans would have grown or collected enough fodder to feed the beasts. Surely having livestock and collecting fodder is farming. If so this pushes way, way back the origins of farming from a little over 10,000 years ago to 500,000 years ago.
That's a fighting spear. The purpose of sharpening both ends is so you can stab with both ends. So, example parry with back end then stab up into throat or eyes. It reminds me of Massai spears which often has a butt spike as well as the spear blade.
What is another name for "spear"? "Digging stick"! I suspect there were many more digging sticks than spears and they would need the same properties as the spear you described, but without a stone tip. Those heavy jaws of the Neanderthal weren't for chewing tough, raw meat, but tough, raw roots, grasses and leaves. A digging stick is usually called a woman's tool, so they are usually denigrated as a lesser tool, but the Gatherers tend to provide more food than the hunters and other tools are ignored because they are not recognized as tools, things like nets and baskets made from vines, grasses and bark, useful for sclepping all that Hunter-Gatherer kit around.
If you have a well balanced "stick" that are 2.5 meters long and are optimized for throwing then your hypothesis does not really make sense. Digging stick could have been much shorter and would have most likely a different diameter.
@@olafkunert3714 The ones used in the South American jungles tend to be long because they are used to knock fruit from trees, club small animals, hook water plants from crock infested rivers and even used at home for hanging materials on, like drying racks for fruits and meat. Of the ones shown in the picture, one is quite bent and another curved, but they are also thousands of years old and time changes all things. Could digging sticks be used as spears? Certainly! But a stick without a weighted head tends to not be stable for throwing, better for thrusting but again, without a sharp, hard head, piercing tough hide is going to be difficult and extremely dangerous for the hunter. There probably are throwing sticks in the cave too, though they may not have been recognized as such. Big game would be a rare hunt, accompanied with much ritual and ceremony and done before Winter, a long march, or to celebrate a large gathering. Spears might be a high status weapon but a secondary tool.
The tricky bit is knowing what it was. Short digging sticks, Hooked foraging sticks etc. look, well, like sticks. Spears have the unique pointy end. To be fair that can be confused with half a bow as well, but both are still recognisable as not natural in shape. I dare say many a digging or foraging stick from Palaeolithic times has been dug up and dismissed as just some stick.
Digging sticks, throwing sticks, drying racks, toys, stretching frames for skins, tent poles, many things that look like "spears" are not. The prejudice toward seeing important things as hunting things when Gathering was and still is the primary food source of Hunter-Gatherers. And to there is a tendency to not see these ancient people as intelligent as we are, because they lack the advanced technology we have. I'm sure the Scientific community is not as prejudiced as we common folk, but a little clarification would be nice. What else was found there. What else could these sticks have been? @@johnfisk811
Adding a stone tip to spears certainly makes sense. But the peculiar thing is that it is enough to attach a tiny tip to achieve the same effect as with a large, elaborately manufactured spearhead. That experienced hunters who should not have known that a tiny tip (size of a fingernail) is quite sufficient to enable penetration of even very thick skin of a prey seems quite strange in this context.
Just looking at the design of the spear suggests to me that it was "set against a charge". Drive the herd towards a narrowed passage and the hominids lept into the passage at the last minute and jabbed one end into the ground and let the animal's momentum impale it on the set spear.
I’m a geologist. The earliest recognized tool is the archulean hand ax. Basically is a wedge of stone sharped on one edge. It was used as a tool and a weapon. But I get your point, there’s always something simpler or earlier.
Stone point spears make a larger wound track allowing a animal to bleed out faster thru the track than what a sharpened wooden spear would do. The wooden spear would compress around the wound track and not allow blood to flow as freely.
Another possible reason for both ends being sharpened on these spears, which you don't see on any modern hunter gathering groups, is that they are not spears. They could be fishing implements or part of traps like a pit trap. With a pit trap both ends need to be sharpened, one goes in the ground and the other in the animal. Regardless, those are made of softwood species and are not very strong. They also look very heavy and would not make very good throwing spears. Having a second sharp end pointing back at you would also be a terrible idea when thrusting into an animal that weighs up to a ton. I am having trouble seeing these as spears at all.
I am not sure what you mean "these are real". Of course they are real, probably from the estimated time and made by humans at the time. My point is that the deduction of how they were used may be faulty. Show me one hunter gatherer group, modern or ancient, who made verified spears using this form. Throwing or pushing. There are not any I am aware of. Unlike these scientists I have hunted with spears, and while these share the same vague form there are too many inconsistencies in their form and materials to make them effective for hunting. Trapping though...
@@jamesstepp1925 they look precisely the same shape as an Olympic javelin which is a throwing spear. So now we have something that looks like a duck and quacks like a duck. Down to you to provide an alternative and plausible hypothesis of what they are instead of what they are not
With a heavy double tipped spear I can see several uses in the diagonal positions if I thrust one tip into the ground I can use the targets weight/momentum to help impaling. Also if I am crouched foraging or resting, having a point at my hand and one thrusting from under my armpit defending my back from very large feline predators who attack at speed from behind their prey... Big predators would impale themselves.
These are the type of videos that keep me up at night because obvious questions were not asked. Your question is on point. Another obvious question is how were these spears made? Using what tools? She said they didn't have the technology yet to attach a stone point to a handle, stick, or spear because of "no glue". Does this mean they didn't have a stone axe to shape the spear from a log, especially considering the spear was made from the interior of a tree instead of a branch? That's a lot of wood removal. Which brings up another question, how was the tree cut down in the first place??? I hate it when obvious questions are not asked..........
@@johannageisel5390 -- Imagine how long it would take to carve a spear from the center of a tree using a stone hand axe. Doesn't seem likely to me. It would seem more likely they used a stone axe with a handle of some sort. But how was it attached? Did the Archeologists experiment how these were made? Oh, and how did they cut down the tree?
@@ironcladranchandforge7292 The spears are not carved from the centre of a tree, they are made from entire thin tree trunks. Those trees were between 20 and 60 years old, but had grown so slowly that they were still very thin, between 2.5 and 4.7cm in diameter. I assume the humans broke them off by throwing their body weight against them, maybe after carving a notch at the base where they wanted it to break. One of the spears even had a little bit of the bast still attached. Source: German Wikipedia
@@johannageisel5390 -- Great, thanks for the information. But, my original comment still applies. Obvious questions were not asked in this interview. Were the ends of the spear fire hardened?
i've been raised on "neanderthals couldn't conceptualize projectile weapons". and ofc, as a good student, i repeated it, despite always feeling a little icked by it. i was really glad when the spears where dated and thus assigned to neanderthals
Personal protection would have been more important than food I would think given the types of predators about... I can imagine a hairy Jacky chan taking down a pack of dire wolf's with a double ended pointy stick
In the time of the year where gathering is more advantageous even the males will be gathering and it is not at least a disgrace but rather you feeding your family. And when you need all hands to disable the mammoth, the strong females will help as well. And of course, yes females give birth and need support and protection in this time; but they are not limited to this role.
I think they were making wooden spears because they could be produced quickly. It seems like they wouldnt be carrying around lots of weopons because they needed to be highly mobile and cover vast distances.
Most academics should try to shape or chip a piece of flint and also to sharpen a piece of wood... Then they can suggest which one has been made first...
PNG highland children throw blade grass 1-2m in length weighing 20-30gm from age 2 still suckling in hunt playing with the older kids usually throwing at eachother. By 6 years they are good and can hit things running. By 10-15 years they are spear throwing warriors - bow and arrow use commences perhaps 5 years later and matures a few years after perhaps 17 years old. At 19 they are king of the jungle.
Oldest weapon is the hand. Next was throwing something.... a rock,bone,stick. 3rd was a club a big stick,bone or holding a rock in the hand. 4th was the spear. Modern human believes they the smart smart. *grunts*
Although I'm a weapons collector and love military history, I just can't get over the fact Chimpanzees eat Bushbabies!! They're SO cute, always wanted one as a pet when I was kid and didn't understand that was impossible. Yeah the classic big hairy tattooed weapon loving Biker shocked by the death of Bushbabies! ...
Humans have a mind. They can plan. It is possible for humans to run down some prey. I've done it myself. About 55 years ago. A young goat. (All right, two young goats, but one of us died and it wasn't me. ) And a flying leap from above. I wouldn't recommend it though. Only luck, prevented injury. What is more natural than to grab a stick to knock fruit off a tree? Because our arms are too short. How many of you have done that without even thinking about it? It is also possible to herd some animals to a spot where the advantage turns better for humans. So long as there is a group of you to do it. Is that how tribes originated? better hunting better protection? Just because humanity back then was young. It doesn't mean they were dumb. What they lacked was knowledge. Not the ability to gain it. Or critique what they did and wonder how to do better. We wouldn't have, what we have without that ability. How did they start to use copper and bronze? What bright spark showed someone, molten metal? 🙂 Who took soggy clay and cooked it? Or was it seeing what happened when baking food? Where is Dr Who and the Tardis when you need him? I'd love to go back for a look see.
20:48 Why are they using both types of spear?... Let's not overlook good old fashioned laziness. I can just hear one of ancesters saying to Ug The Progressive who is advocating adding a stone tip to a wooden spear... "But it works... So I'm NOT going to fix it!"
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein
Yes we will revert backwards
Well not sticks and stones exactly. After many generations have bred out the catastrophic mutagenic ailments from a slowly increasing population, some form of mechanical weapons would be developed from the limited residual technological leftovers from pre-world war 3. And we're dumb enough as a species not to have finally learned from such an incident of near self extinction, only to repeat the cycle. Our anthropocentric irrational narcissism is what will finish us off.
Cynicism? Nope, just aware of the blatantly obvious.
Hopeful? Yes, that we might develop the maturity to drag ourselves out of our primitive cradle.
You can't have a world war without international coordination. If people are using sticks and stones to fight then they're not going to be communicating internationally to coordinate warfare.
World War IV will be fought with dislikes on TikTok commerade, do our nuclear weapons even work? Do you know?
If we bomb ourselves back to the stoneage in WWIII, we wouldn't be capable of waging another world war. Not until we build back to a state of great enough sophistication.
What a great mind...Look into the think-tank behind old Bert.
Hawaiians were using wood tipped, barbed, spears for combat up until the early 1800's. The weight of the spear with its momentum make it deadly, even with a blunt tip. We throw them during makahiki games, and a proficient person can throw many yards accurately as well as catch spears thrown at them (seriously, look it up).
That seems like a sight to behold Thanks M8 I love this kinda stuff
I like your comment. Thanks for the knowledge. Then the British empire came along with canons and muskets and wiped out lots of indigenous people. I’m from Scotland. Peace
Kamehameha I was known for catching them out of the air when they were thrown at him in anger. Like, what a fucking boss move lol
@@CardinalKaos I teach Hawaiian history, and honestly, I didn't believe some of the stories...at first. Captain Vancouver wrote in his official journal that Kamehameha caught 4/6 spear thrown at him, parried one, and dodged the last. They still have Lua training here on Maui. I've seen guys do it, while moving forward. It's nuts.
Should be noted also that Hawaiians were also canibals up to the artival of Westerners
The same as most Pacific islanders....they found the palms of victims the most delicious to eat.
Stone age cultures were an anacronism up until the 1800s.....are an anomily of humankind caused by isolation.
One of the fascinating things about the Schöningen spears is what they tell us about how well the makers understood the material properties of the wood they used. The base of a tree/sapling is stronger, more dense wood and more resistant to damage as a result. These spears were made specifically to take advantage of this, with the proximal or striking point made from the base of the sapling, and the distal end the lighter, more flexible wood, which helps in flight and in avoiding shaft breakage upon impact. This indicates that they understood the material properties of the wood very well, and made these spears specifically maximize their effectiveness in light of the material properties.
and many generations no doubt, to get to that level of intricacy.
Yup. They weren't dumb. Children that grew up, well...like me, figure these things out.
The people from this time were masters of their environment (as we are today, in a sense).
I believe that the really astounding achievements have been lost to time.
For me...acting impressed that they knew how to utilize the simple materials at their disposal, is an insult to their intelligence.
I don't mean to cause argument. I am just stating my opinion.
That could also mean that they were capable of making other things out of wood. It's a bit of a shame that none of that is ever found. Wood would be the easiest material to express their culture one would think.
@@telebubba5527 Of course they were capable of making other things, they were as intelligent as we are they just weren't as technologically advanced. They had their Einsteins and Michelangelos too.
@@letsdothis9063 neanderthals knew how to make birch tar. who knows when it was invented.
Dr Milks is an eloquent and knowledgeable speaker and obviously passionate about her work. It was a pleasure to listen to her explain the past.
Likewise, it was a pleasure to look upon Dr. Milks as she described the predawn of humanity.
@@peterplotts1238 Indeed, she had my attention in total.
Makes sense that they’d still use just wood spears, even once they started making flint or rock tipped spears. The wooden spears are easier to make and would work just fine for quite a few things, could save the harder to make flint or rock tipped spear for when they’d really need it then. You wouldn’t want to damage your good spear or lose the rock tip, when you can use an easier to make wooden spear instead. 🤷♀️
Excellent "point" ( no pun intended). Also, in training children, wooden spears would make more sense because they were easier to make, resharpen, and if broken, easier to replace.
Whatever works! The practical, was the way of life at the time.
That's the one thing I think about. When stuck in the wilderness, don't tie your knife to a stick. If you throw it for hunting, the knife might get stuck in the prey and you only have one knife. Use the knife to make the stick itself pointy, because that way you can have as many spears as you need.
How did the tool suit the purpose? These spears would be good for spear fishing. In shallow calm water where fish were abundant. A flint spear tip wrapped in gut or plant string wouldn’t last very long getting wet.
@@mattjessup8376 Yes, they were building the Box we are supposed to think outside of! A stone from the ground can be a deadly weapon, for a small animal or a distraction for a larger one, a curved stick makes a boomerang that will fly a good distance and kill something and took ten minutes to carve, with a sharp rock. Everything is a tool if you have the mind to see it and that means smarts! Those old Homos were plenty smart, smart enough to build a society out of the wilderness, even before the invention of the Cell Phone.
11:38 "Why they left them behind [the spears at Schöningen]" seems pretty obvious to me. She mentioned that the area was a lake shore, which is where big game come to drink. Hunters likely ambushed game at the shoreline, and the spears that missed their prey simply torpedoed into the water and buried themselves in the silt/clay.
Or they came to this site at a certain time of the year to hunt the big game there - and didn't want to carry around their whole arsenal all year, so they buried them into the ground to hide them and dig them out again next year. Then something happened and they never returned.
The sort of trees need to make wooden spears is fairly common worldwide, while the kind of stone needed to make durable points is somewhat rare and also more difficult to find. This alone suggests that wooden spears would remain in use after stone working becomes available.
Also when the spear gets stuck in the animal, you'll lose the stone (or later metal) tip. When the same tool could be use to sharpen more sticks into spears.
You need to lose the whole "worldwide" idea. Here I Australia we don't Have the same types of trees that grow in the Europe, North America etc.
There is a Lot more to The World than Europe, Eurasia and North America.
Late comment but stone tips also take FOREVER to make and a ton of skill
@@stephanieyee9784 what do you mean?? Australia has plenty of trees suitable for making spear out of. He never said it was just Europe and North America...
We play with their skulls. But these were living creatures who loved, who hated, who mated, raised children, had lives of happiness and sorrow, danger and peace. I think it's important to remember that.
Grave robbing has always been very popular among academics,and it's always for "science".
I've seen a video of a young man in the Balkans, wearing traditional clothing, spear a boar with a wooden spear. His dogs were worrying the boar and the boar ran straight at him. He simply braced his spear against the ground and held it pointing towards the running boar. The boar ran into the spear, impaling himself. It's like the boar did not recognize the spear as being dangerous. The boar was focused on attacking the man. The spear impaled the boar all the way through and the man picked the boar up and threw the boar down so the boar was on his back. The boar was still alive and squealing loudly. The young man drew a large knife from his belt and stabbed the boar in the neck and the boar soon died. It was an impressive sight. The man seemed to be very experienced with spear hunting boar.
Same technique used by South American natives to hunt El tigre
@@jackbehling5694 Sweetie there are no tigers to hunt in South America. Maybe you are thinking of the jaguar? Nobody is hunting them either. Too elusive,
"Tigre" is how very old south americans called the jaguar, both in spanish and portuguese. Nowadays they are called "onça" on Brazil.
@@cillyhoney1892"Sweetie" stfu if you don't now what you're talking aboutn
Proof that Germans have always been good engineers 🤣
Really good! I for one would be interested in a film on the experimental use of these tools. Nice one team! 🌟👍
I'd be more interested to see them test actual replicas because the samples we saw were too straight! Maybe 'too straight' is not accurate, what i mean is, the originals weren't as straight as the ones on the desk.
@@Moamanly But the spears may have originally been straight and became warped after thousands of years in the ground, with changes in ground movement, pressure and water over time. With the high resolution CT scans she mentioned I am sure they could tell due to the wood grain if these were originally straight or not
@@carolyncopeland2722 Yeah that's an excellent point you make, it would certainly make sense, for an effective missile that was used over such a long period, to be straight.
The most successful hunting tool is not so much the spear itself, it’s group tactics. The plan was not just to sneak up on the beast and then throw spears, it was to position hunters where the beast was likely to run when surprised by the women & children who scare the beast in the intended direction (into the waiting spear chucking range and spear jabbing range.
If you can get one deep spear wound into the belly or leg of a mammoth the animal will die, it’ll take a few days though but presumably it’s pack will have to leave it behind and eventually it will die.
You might be confusing hunting strategy and hunting tool. The strategy you describe and which undoubtedly led to a higher kill rate would be worthless without a tool unless you plan on choking the beasts you speak of.
Really? You have proof of Hunter gatherers using this technique in modern times?
@@fintonmainz7845chimps use this strat.
In hunting wild boar, didn't they have beaters to scare the animals down paths and have person with a spear planted so that when the boar attacked it could run onto the spear. More in medieval times and probably with tipped spears.
Can we please have a video on all the testing they did? That looks fascinating
In case anyone hadn't realised it, Clacton-on-Sea would not have been 'on-sea' 400,000 years ago, but in the middle of a continuous land mass from what is now the British Isles across to the Central European Plain. Doggerland no longer exists as the North Sea drowned it relatively recently.
And all in an afternoon.
It occurs to me that if you throw a spear like this at an elephant (from a short distance, these are heavy) it won't go in very far, but if the elephant charges you with one end of the spear penetrating just enough to stay put, and the other (also sharp) end of the spear on the ground, the elephant will do the work for you and impale itself. This might mean that hunting large, aggressive animals is actually easier than hunting smaller, less aggressive animals.
They would also have set traps for them to fall in.
They probably used teamwork to scare the beast towards guys hiding and ready to do exactly that. A panicked animal with lots of momentum could really get impaled. Also when surrounding a wounded beast I picture them charging/surrounding from 2 or 3 directions then as they simultaneously poke the beast, they jam the back end down into the ground. Each spear penetrating the hide upward with a 45 degree angle and the back end of the spear locked into the ground, the beast could not push against the spear. With 3 spears evenly spaced around the beast, it can not move without impaling itself. After it’s trapped like this, the hunters would make the kill.
@@douginorlando6260 yes. if you can come up with that then so did they
you must be french ! surrender monkey much!??
et tu c"est la sange c"est vraiment veritais !!
we,ll see what happens
et tu c"est la sange c"est vraiment veritais !!
Never seen this channel in my feed before. Not even three minutes in and I’m subscribed. Immediately into knowledgeable and qualified person giving a very thorough explanations and descriptions. Love it
Welcome aboard!
You’re in for a treat!
up to a point
I have three different examples of hardwood tipped long arrows (1.5m) from Papua New Guinea they look and are scary effective in both hunting and warfare.
I mean, skin only is that hard. Once you get over that hardness, there is no increase in effectiveness anymore. The only thing that makes the projectile deadlier at that point is to hurl (shoot) it with more speed or to make it heavier and shoot it at the same speed. Therefor, hardwood arrow = fine.
@@johannageisel5390A pointed stick is not very effective at killing an animal unless they’re poisoned. A broad head type tip cuts blood vessels whereas a pointed tip will usually push them aside.
That was so interesting I’m amazed those spears were 400 thousand years old
Are you thinking the replicas are the 400 thousand year old spears?
@@rich8085 they clearly are, even though they're called replicas they're replicas that were made 400 thousand years ago
@@murkyseb no
@@yedidyah-jedshlomoh1533 nah they are
@@murkyseb Look up replica.
The phenomenon that different levels of technology exist next to each other (like the fully wooden spears and the stone-tipped spears they talk about around minute 20) is also known from other time periods.
For example, the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle has a bronze arrow tip and a stone arrow tip, both from the Bronze Age. The tips are of the same size and shape (very finely made, about the size of a larger fingernail).
I assume it has to do with availability of material. If you had access to the better stuff, you could use that, but if you maybe didn't have any of that at the time, you would fall back onto the earlier technology and make do with that.
Or maybe if you can do with the easier/cheaper method, you will not undertake the effort of using the more costly version. A wooden spear is made more quickly than a stone-tipped spear, so it's "cheaper" in time. And bronze was expensive, so a stone arrow tip was cheaper than a bronze one.
Stone spear and arrow tips tend to be single use, they break off, often inside the body of the target, helping it to die faster, but meaning you have to make a new tip, or repair an old one, each time. Not to with a bronze tip. As for the stack of wooden "Spear/digging stick" shafts, they could simply be waiting for their tips.
Just saw a throwing demonstration with replicas of the Schöningen Spears, the modern athletes noted how alike they are to the Olympic Javelins.
A pointy stick is also good for uses other than poking animals and people. You can use it to dig or carry or drag or stack them together and make a temporary shelter. They don't have to be thrown or thrust; you can plant one end like pikemen receiving a cavalry charge or how Japanese hunters would defend against a bear. It's a useful all round outdoors tool, just as an axe or a knife is.
Also great for reaching things, in a tree or stream or supporting ones weight eg when crossing a stream.
They obviously must travel in groups and the lake was a seasonal habitat. The spears may have been left behind at the site because they had made more than they used and decided to leave them for when they return next season. I’m sure the clan members would feel good about knowing the lake site is set up for their return, waiting for them. Probably also some kind of shelter waiting for their return too.
A less happy thought is that they made enough spears for the clan but not all of them survived the hunts. The spears of the fallen were perhaps left in honour of them or they were limited in ehat thdy could carry.
@@teatowel11 yes, a possible explanation that makes sense … but I like a happy story better😁
Whilst Dr Milks correctly refers to these spear users as hominids, Tristan however refers to them as humans as does the title of this video. These artefacts are not human artefacts and it is somewhat human centric to claim they are. As 400,000 years ago Humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) did not exist on the planet. There are multiple branches of Hominids and not all hominids are the ancestors of humans. I am experienced in the handling and use of numerous hand weapons. As an observation the length and thickness of the spears shown in the video are very similar to the dimensions (although not the materials) of medieval thrusting spears. Although how Neanderthals and Homo Heidelbergensis would use them remains a matter of conjecture particularly in view of their different physiology when compared with Homo Sapiens Sapiens. 😀😀😀
Well, there is still a bit of a debate whether we should count Homo neanderthalensis and other such groups as "human" or not.
The word "human" can be used in a narrower sense for "Homo sapiens" and in a broader sense for "any hominid that had an intelligence and capability comparable to our own".
I was born in Essex and I've been to Clacton. Not entirely suprised one of the earliest weapons was found there to be honest.
The best presenter ever. Every syllable clearly understandable. She should be a news reader.
She's well over qualified for that.
Which occurred first, the spear or the hiking staff? Did early man started to use a stick to help him or her walk and then found could be used as a spear?
Would a wooden spear leave identifiable marks on bones? They could kill an animal by penetrating a blood vessel, or vital organs (heart, lung), causing bleeding, shock, or loss of function without cutting any bones encountered. Any impact damage (say skull fracture or even rib breaks) would probably be indistinguishable from blunt instruments like clubs.
Highly unlikely as wood is softer than bone. The tip would deform before the bone would. It is to cause flesh wound and get it to bleed out. As you said, the skull and rib cage would be the only bones to get damaged, maybe the shoulder blade. It would look like any other blunt force trauma though, if it was the skull. A rib cage might show it as a round hole, but that would've been eaten and the bones discarded, or eaten by dogs.
@@Yvolve Sounds plausible but is untrue, sure the tip would deform but given enough force a wooden spear tip would definitely break bone. By the way, you know what's also softer than bone? Lead
@@JerehmiaBoaz Given the shape of most bones, it would not break it, but have it be a glancing blow. You'd have to hit it exactly right, or it won't break a bone.
You know what travels at 100's of meters per second and therefore have the immense potential kinetic energy in a tiny object? A bullet.
You know what disintegrates on impact? A bullet.
You know what stays intact on impact? A wooden spear because you can't throw it with enough force for it to explode.
The fact you compare these, shows you have very little understanding of what is going on.
@@Yvolve Sorry but that just isn't true, physically speaking it depends on the pressure generated (dependent on speed and mass of the spear and surface area of its tip) and the tensile strength and elasticity of both the spear tip and the bone. The fact that you think that a "hard" material can't be destroyed by a "soft" material proves you're operating on intuition. (Kinetic energy is 0.5m * v^2 so an 8 gram bullet traveling at 300 m/s has exactly the same kinetic energy as a 1.8 kg spear traveling at 20 m/s.)
@@JerehmiaBoaz No, bones aren't flat, so unless you hit it so the point is perfectly perpendicular to the surface it is impacting, it will glance. The chances of hitting a bone perfectly like that is near impossible.
If you read my first comment in its entirety. you would've seen I said that the skull, rib cage and shoulder blade would get destroyed because of the shape. All bone.
The fact you assume that I think what you assume, shows you can't think outside of your own very limited experience, knowledge and reasoning, as you need me to think a certain way for your "argument" to hold up.
I'm specifically talking about thrown wooden spears and bone, nothing else, yet you imply I think this goes for every combination which is similar. You might think this way, hence the idiotic comparison to bullets, but I don't.
A wooden arrow, despite being light and quite fragile, will easily go through skin and can definitely break bones, because of the potential kinetic energy the bow imparted on the arrow. It is also moving so fast, the point doesn't have time to move out of the way, unlike a thrown spear.
With the double taper weighted toward on end, the spears could certainly be thrown
@27:31-27:41: Mentions Congo, which is in Central Africa, but shows an image of Maasai warriors near the Ngorongoro Crater, which is in Tanzania, East Africa.
There were no borders back in the day so everyone was just from Africa (must have been a nightmare being a paleolithic postman)
Fascinating. I have often thought about what I'd do if I suddenly awoke naked and alone in some prehistoric era. I task myself with getting a long, strong stick to jab with and a few throwing sized rocks. Then shelter and food.
Shelter, water, hunting weapons, food. In that order.
That's a classic anxiety dream
Very in depth, thank you! These quality videos simply cannot be replicated by A.l. Bravo
If you are bipedal with hands you are going to carry a spear, because if you don't you will become a predator's meal. This almost certainly goes back a long time. Consider Lucy: a little over three feet tall and walking around in an environment with lions, hyenas, and leopards, among others. Human bipedality makes you slow, too slow to run away from predators. However, bipedality means you can carry a sharpened stick, making it dangerous for predators to attack you, especially if you travel in groups. Predators don't take risks it they don't have to. A group of 3-5 foot tall apes might look tasty to a lion, but those sticks...
I imagine if you went back two million years to East Africa, you would never see Hominins wandering around without spears.
Bone tips are a sharpenable hard material that could be used on spears. Many examples are recorded in history.
Also, succesful hunters would have lots of bones.
Indigenous Australian are still using wooden spears, with fire hardened tips on traditional hunts. Selecting and shaping a sapling has significant meaning. Not surprisingly from one of the world’s longest continuous culture, and worth looking at for greater insight.
We are the ORIGINAL people mate. When OZ was attached to Antarctica, along with sth america, and other continents.
@ConontheBinarianplease explain why an offset point is good
Really cool composite spears are made by some tribes. The shaft is more like a light cane, and then there is a hardwood tip that both weights that end and is more robust and keeps a sharper edge.
There are thrown with a woomera (although that name is used by different tribes in central Australia) otherwise known as an atlatle or spear chucker.
I guarantee EVERY SINGLE HUMAN, pre-human or near relative carried wooden spears. But because they all rotted away ... science takes that to mean "there were no spears" during those periods. BS. Early man couldn't have made it in the wilds without at least long, sharp sticks.
Many are still unsure whether Clactonians form part of any human group, even today.
I would reckon purely wooden spears persisted after stone-tipped spears were developed because stone-tipped spears are only marginally more effective then purely wooden spears, way more time/effort consuming to make, and more prone to snapping after a single use. In short, stone-tipped spears offer marginal improvement for far more resources consumed. It was still very useful to have purely wooden spears as backup.
Finally a Neanderthal recreation that isnt clearly biased towards some racial ideological agenda. Much appreciated.
Why would a Neanderthal have Germanic features as opposed to Basque?
Indo-European vs non-Indo-European.
Cartoon Propaganda vs OBSERVABLE facts
History Hit can you combine 1 indian bull elephant, 1 snake, two spears, 2 handfans, 1 wall, 1 rope, and 4 trees in real life called Blind Men's Elephant and also does Blind Men's Elephant exist in real life?
Would extra development of right arm musculature fix points not suggest a throwing motion development, implying spear throwing? If medieval bowmen can be identified from the skeletons then why not Neanderthal spear throwers?
Sometimes you need a $3000 Tikka in 7mm 08, and sometimes you only need a Cooey single shot 22lr. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, sometimes the hunt requires something powerful and high end, sometimes the simple and old is enough and it’s cheaper. A stone tipped spear is much harder to make and a missed shot can easily break it.
I've learnt to nap rocks 60 years ago in my 20 s I live in the mountains for a little over 2 years . My walking stick I used every day one end was sharp an fire hardened. In the end I used it for small game ...birds spearing fish ECT. Also my finer spear points were made in the winter while hold up in a cave for the winter
A very uncomfortable discussion about woman’s participation in hunting. It’s known that children and women hunted small game and birds. But it’s too high of a societal risk to have women in a small group hunt larger dangerous game. And there were many other activities that needed their attention and time. Children, cooking, preserving food, making clothes, gathering plants for food and medicine, and so forth. Division of labor is a principal of this kind of lifestyle.
My question is, were spears initially walking sticks that were intentionally honed after being cut to size, then fit to the person’s gait, and shaved to modify the overall weight and shape to the person’s liking, for both throwing and walking with?
They were obviously hunting tools, and a vast majority of hunting is tracking; and a walking stick is a nice tool for navigating a variety of terrain.
I am just saying, the way spears are held in reconstructions and artwork really strikes me as driving a narrative that paints our ancestors in a way that doesn’t indicate that they cared about how they looked, or how simultaneously strong and agile they were. Most animals groom and hominins are obviously invested in being attractive and have style for that ancient cultural moment probably had some interesting beauty regimens.
The imagery instead making these people look sloppy, aggressive and dumb. This wholly flattens what life would have actually looked like for these peoples.
Humans had a lot of time on their hands before we started farming… messing about and playing with what was available, I am sure the dudes wandering around vast territories, tracking food, and making hunting strategies or just hanging about with their mates, they would probably want to customize their tools just so. Think about how little kids pick sticks, they have to be just right and some kids like to have a bunch of sticks and try them out and others like to choose just the perfect stick.
You can’t tell me that there wasn’t some healthy and unhealthy competition happening between siblings and mates back in the day, driving experimentation and variation in the early tools made by hominins.
I think evidence is being bent to fit modern ideas with regards to the size the spears, when speaking to it being evidence of female's hunting with males, which I'm sure happened at some point. Though I think we need to stop injecting modern ideals on the past, it's much more likely to have been adolescent males out with older males learning the craft, who would have needed smaller spears (just like today you have junior sized bows and firearms). Also, back in this period a tribe of people would not risk their young females hunting and being killed, you have to remember that you can lose most of the males in a tribe if something were to happen (like a hunting accident) and still repopulate, the opposite is not true, making them usually too valuable to lose. To highlight my points and give some reference, you need only look at surviving hunter-gatherer tribes today and mostly women are not regularly taught to hunt or taken on hunts and most of the ones that do, are not there to actively participate but to help with the kill and maybe do a little gathering in area farther from the safety of the village.
Why wooden and stone-tipped spears alongside each other? Balance. It is (well, not easy, but well within reach of early peoples) to make balanced wooden spears. Overweight the tip, especially by tying a rock to it, and it will tumble as soon as it leaves the hand.
Hello. We cannot recognize "The Oldest Weapons in Human History" -- since we don´t know what we have not found.
If I understood correctly, humankind began to use flint points and stone tools about 230,000 years ago, and the earliest known points/tools were discovered at sites in Europe and the Near East. Doesn't this push the dawn of proper humans back to a time earlier than often stated? If so, wouldn't the earliest artifacts be in Africa?
Wooden spears are going to have a use even to people who know how to work stone. If you're a hunter-gatherer you have to use the materials to hand. Good stone isn't available everywhere. Different environments have different geology and in many places the bedrock is a long way down, or the predominant forms of rock are too soft to make useful tools, or too tough to be worked easily. Nomadic people may have picked up supplies of stones when they passed through an area that had them, and they may have traded with other groups that had stone to spare. But it would always be sensible to be able to make weapons and tools from a variety of materials so you can still hunt if you don't have any good rocks nearby.
14:25 If we look at the societies of hunter-gatherers still existing or known to us today, it is equally unlikely that our female ancestors actively participated in hunting. On the one hand, for physiological reasons, and on the other, the protection of childbearing individuals in a hostile and inhospitable environment guaranteed the preservation and continued existence of the rarefied groups as a whole.
IMO, Rocks, and Gravity were the earliest/ oldest weapons. The fire was right up there...
You cant say that mate, the yanks would deny that, it was a bloke in america under an apple tree. before that there was no gravity..
I think Neanderthal women where pretty strong. They could hunt.
I had no idea as to the size of the spears! They are huge and I suspect the mussels required to throw them effectively was SIGNIFICANT! Incredible video!
It’s a good day when I learn something new and today was a very good day!
Beware the murderous giant bivalve with a spear and attitude
@@kellyharbeson18 they look exactly like javelins
@@kellyharbeson18 I have indeed thrown the javelin competitively. The frontal centre of gravity gives these away as javelins.
As for them being poor weapons, well, for some reason the Egyptians used them extensively and they were a military superpower.
And this poor weapon was used decisively in the battle of Lechaeum
@@kellyharbeson18 Thank you for the clarification! As for spears, I’m not sure if darts are a accurate description for a spear…
@@kellyharbeson18 they were used in warfare, by people who knew what they were doing, and who were quite literally staking their lives on how good they were. And they practiced a lot.
And if YOU have thrown javelin competitively, you know that you are going for distance and nothing else, which is not the same as throwing javelins at a bunch of people with the aim of killing them.
Furthermore, the English longbow certainly IS a precision weapon at shorter range, while being an excellent saturation weapon too.
Cave paintings show that people used throwing javelins extensively for hunting.
The most effective way to use these spears might be to stab one end into the ground at the bottom of a pit and chase the animal to the pit.
I think I heard they drove them down narrow passages and a posse of hominins went 'psycho on them' (my quote). Oh they used to drive big things off cliffs too. Your idea is defo plausible imo.
Too much effort. You're burning more calories than you'll end up getting from the animal. You'd have to dig the hole, put the spears in, find an animal, which you could've killed with the spear you put in the hole, than drive it to and into the hole, to die falling on the spear you could've killed it with if you didn't dig a hole and left it in there.
Why go through this effort when you can stalk an animal and kill it from a distance with a spear that flies like a modern-day javelin?
These spears are amazingly multi-purpose in their simplicity. Use the narrower end as a lance, and the thicker end as a weighted spear. You could even discipline teenagers or unruly livestock with a quick whack.
Who ever thought that Neanderthals didn't use spears?
What a stupid assumption.
My goodness. She's awesome. That silky shirt on her is amazing.
cant the double points be because of that they used them as a trap, ramming them in an angle into the earth and then chased horses into them?
I see a connection with today.. Education, commerce, thought exchange, call it life
I wonder how many times someone has found a, "pointy stuck," and had no idea that they were holding a spear from half-a-million years ago? If you don't know what you're looking at it's just a pointy stick, isn't it? Not so many people have the training to recognize one, do they?
NOT the oldest - they postdate the earlier Clacton spear point.
Pointed at both ends so when one end is broken off say in a target after a thrust the other end is usable as well.
Why is there a debate about whether it was thrown or thrusted? What would your action be if you had that tool now? You'd either throw or thrust it, based on the situation, right? Tried to reproduce it for testing? Were all of you born adults, with no chance to experience childhood?
It took half way through the interview to confirm my suspicions that we were looking at reproductions, and to finally discuss how they were made and used.
The question remains where are the original spears and what do they look like. The reproductions look very straight and perfectly shaped and rather heavy.
It is said at 3:17 that these are replicas..
@@soulless435 Yes, barely mentioned, but it should have been said up front and I can only assume the brief glimpse of something or other may have been the originals. They should have been revealed in detail.
There were several photographs of the originals, admittedly only the terminal end, but there was a scale bar included
Haha haha haha 😂😂😂😂😂😂 third Reich or what?????😢😢😢😢😢😢
i just can't listen this lady....ummm ummmm i just cannot
There’s Turkish Homo Erectus and German Homo Heidelbergensis bones been found with tuberculosis scars. TB is a bovine disease and it’s possible that the infections came from living close to some form of cattle. How close? Perhaps having cattle living over winter in the host’s home similar to what still happens in parts of Asia or perhaps from corralling cattle or having them in an open range. Cattle in the home or corralled would require winter feeding and presumably if this did happen the early humans would have grown or collected enough fodder to feed the beasts. Surely having livestock and collecting fodder is farming. If so this pushes way, way back the origins of farming from a little over 10,000 years ago to 500,000 years ago.
Really enjoyed this video, so thoughtful and exciting at the same time. Thank you to all concerned, especially Dr. Milks.
That's a fighting spear. The purpose of sharpening both ends is so you can stab with both ends. So, example parry with back end then stab up into throat or eyes. It reminds me of Massai spears which often has a butt spike as well as the spear blade.
the spear was the king of historical weapons for sure
"Behold! I have invented the LARGE POINTY STICK!!!" - some person in the past
The woman is not clear about what she says .
What is another name for "spear"? "Digging stick"! I suspect there were many more digging sticks than spears and they would need the same properties as the spear you described, but without a stone tip. Those heavy jaws of the Neanderthal weren't for chewing tough, raw meat, but tough, raw roots, grasses and leaves. A digging stick is usually called a woman's tool, so they are usually denigrated as a lesser tool, but the Gatherers tend to provide more food than the hunters and other tools are ignored because they are not recognized as tools, things like nets and baskets made from vines, grasses and bark, useful for sclepping all that Hunter-Gatherer kit around.
If you have a well balanced "stick" that are 2.5 meters long and are optimized for throwing then your hypothesis does not really make sense.
Digging stick could have been much shorter and would have most likely a different diameter.
@@olafkunert3714 The ones used in the South American jungles tend to be long because they are used to knock fruit from trees, club small animals, hook water plants from crock infested rivers and even used at home for hanging materials on, like drying racks for fruits and meat. Of the ones shown in the picture, one is quite bent and another curved, but they are also thousands of years old and time changes all things. Could digging sticks be used as spears? Certainly! But a stick without a weighted head tends to not be stable for throwing, better for thrusting but again, without a sharp, hard head, piercing tough hide is going to be difficult and extremely dangerous for the hunter. There probably are throwing sticks in the cave too, though they may not have been recognized as such. Big game would be a rare hunt, accompanied with much ritual and ceremony and done before Winter, a long march, or to celebrate a large gathering. Spears might be a high status weapon but a secondary tool.
The tricky bit is knowing what it was. Short digging sticks, Hooked foraging sticks etc. look, well, like sticks. Spears have the unique pointy end. To be fair that can be confused with half a bow as well, but both are still recognisable as not natural in shape. I dare say many a digging or foraging stick from Palaeolithic times has been dug up and dismissed as just some stick.
Digging sticks, throwing sticks, drying racks, toys, stretching frames for skins, tent poles, many things that look like "spears" are not. The prejudice toward seeing important things as hunting things when Gathering was and still is the primary food source of Hunter-Gatherers. And to there is a tendency to not see these ancient people as intelligent as we are, because they lack the advanced technology we have. I'm sure the Scientific community is not as prejudiced as we common folk, but a little clarification would be nice. What else was found there. What else could these sticks have been? @@johnfisk811
Adding a stone tip to spears certainly makes sense. But the peculiar thing is that it is enough to attach a tiny tip to achieve the same effect as with a large, elaborately manufactured spearhead. That experienced hunters who should not have known that a tiny tip (size of a fingernail) is quite sufficient to enable penetration of even very thick skin of a prey seems quite strange in this context.
can blind men's elephant be kept as a pet in real life?
Just looking at the design of the spear suggests to me that it was "set against a charge".
Drive the herd towards a narrowed passage and the hominids lept into the passage at the last minute and jabbed one end into the ground and let the animal's momentum impale it on the set spear.
I hadn't thought about that! The same thing was used around camps and forts up to the 19th century.
I would argue that the oldest weapon in human history was more than likely a simple rock or a stick.
spear = stick
I’m a geologist. The earliest recognized tool is the archulean hand ax. Basically is a wedge of stone sharped on one edge. It was used as a tool and a weapon. But I get your point, there’s always something simpler or earlier.
Precious specimens like these should not be touched with bare hands.
These are copies.
Stone point spears make a larger wound track allowing a animal to bleed out faster thru the track than what a sharpened wooden spear would do. The wooden spear would compress around the wound track and not allow blood to flow as freely.
I don't remember hearing if the points of the spears were fire hardened. This would make them stronger and not as likely to break upon impact.
Lady you are about to fall out of your blouse
I think the double ended throwing stick was thrown forehand not backhand.
I agree, though I haven't done any experiments to check. I wonder when the atlatl was invented.
Another possible reason for both ends being sharpened on these spears, which you don't see on any modern hunter gathering groups, is that they are not spears. They could be fishing implements or part of traps like a pit trap. With a pit trap both ends need to be sharpened, one goes in the ground and the other in the animal. Regardless, those are made of softwood species and are not very strong. They also look very heavy and would not make very good throwing spears. Having a second sharp end pointing back at you would also be a terrible idea when thrusting into an animal that weighs up to a ton. I am having trouble seeing these as spears at all.
Yeah. Except these were real
I am not sure what you mean "these are real". Of course they are real, probably from the estimated time and made by humans at the time. My point is that the deduction of how they were used may be faulty. Show me one hunter gatherer group, modern or ancient, who made verified spears using this form. Throwing or pushing. There are not any I am aware of. Unlike these scientists I have hunted with spears, and while these share the same vague form there are too many inconsistencies in their form and materials to make them effective for hunting. Trapping though...
@@jamesstepp1925 they look precisely the same shape as an Olympic javelin which is a throwing spear.
So now we have something that looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.
Down to you to provide an alternative and plausible hypothesis of what they are instead of what they are not
I wonder if AI in the future will be this interested in the archialogical remains of current humans.
With a heavy double tipped spear I can see several uses in the diagonal positions if I thrust one tip into the ground I can use the targets weight/momentum to help impaling. Also if I am crouched foraging or resting, having a point at my hand and one thrusting from under my armpit defending my back from very large feline predators who attack at speed from behind their prey... Big predators would impale themselves.
Is there any evidence of these spears having been fire hardened?
These are the type of videos that keep me up at night because obvious questions were not asked. Your question is on point. Another obvious question is how were these spears made? Using what tools? She said they didn't have the technology yet to attach a stone point to a handle, stick, or spear because of "no glue". Does this mean they didn't have a stone axe to shape the spear from a log, especially considering the spear was made from the interior of a tree instead of a branch? That's a lot of wood removal. Which brings up another question, how was the tree cut down in the first place??? I hate it when obvious questions are not asked..........
@@ironcladranchandforge7292 They had handheld stone axes. Basically a stone with a sharp edge that could be used to cut or scrape or split the wood.
@@johannageisel5390 -- Imagine how long it would take to carve a spear from the center of a tree using a stone hand axe. Doesn't seem likely to me. It would seem more likely they used a stone axe with a handle of some sort. But how was it attached? Did the Archeologists experiment how these were made? Oh, and how did they cut down the tree?
@@ironcladranchandforge7292 The spears are not carved from the centre of a tree, they are made from entire thin tree trunks.
Those trees were between 20 and 60 years old, but had grown so slowly that they were still very thin, between 2.5 and 4.7cm in diameter.
I assume the humans broke them off by throwing their body weight against them, maybe after carving a notch at the base where they wanted it to break.
One of the spears even had a little bit of the bast still attached.
Source: German Wikipedia
@@johannageisel5390 -- Great, thanks for the information. But, my original comment still applies. Obvious questions were not asked in this interview. Were the ends of the spear fire hardened?
i've been raised on "neanderthals couldn't conceptualize projectile weapons". and ofc, as a good student, i repeated it, despite always feeling a little icked by it.
i was really glad when the spears where dated and thus assigned to neanderthals
Personal protection would have been more important than food I would think given the types of predators about... I can imagine a hairy Jacky chan taking down a pack of dire wolf's with a double ended pointy stick
I’m thinking the oldest weapon in human history is a rock, but what do I know?
Stick or rock? I would bet on the stick being used first but i imagine which ever was closest when it was first needed 😂
Rocks and sticks aren't weapons, they're natural objects. Spears are artificial tools designed to kill things, so they're weapons.
Perhaps after a clenched fist 😂
In the time of the year where gathering is more advantageous even the males will be gathering and it is not at least a disgrace but rather you feeding your family. And when you need all hands to disable the mammoth, the strong females will help as well. And of course, yes females give birth and need support and protection in this time; but they are not limited to this role.
Clactonians haven't evolved that much since the discovery in 1911 of the sharpened Yew branch.........😂
I think they were making wooden spears because they could be produced quickly. It seems like they wouldnt be carrying around lots of weopons because they needed to be highly mobile and cover vast distances.
Cheaper than flint tipped... technolgy is influenced by resources and labour, hence the Lavois production-line. Making a lot out of little!
Most academics should try to shape or chip a piece of flint and also to sharpen a piece of wood... Then they can suggest which one has been made first...
PNG highland children throw blade grass 1-2m in length weighing 20-30gm from age 2 still suckling in hunt playing with the older kids usually throwing at eachother.
By 6 years they are good and can hit things running.
By 10-15 years they are spear throwing warriors - bow and arrow use commences perhaps 5 years later and matures a few years after perhaps 17 years old. At 19 they are king of the jungle.
Interesting. A lot was pure speculation, which was a problem for me, since I want information, not opinion.
Oldest weapon is the hand. Next was throwing something.... a rock,bone,stick. 3rd was a club a big stick,bone or holding a rock in the hand. 4th was the spear.
Modern human believes they the smart smart. *grunts*
My quess it that the spears were left behind immediately after a kill because the people were moved quickly off the kill by predators.
Although I'm a weapons collector and love military history, I just can't get over the fact Chimpanzees eat Bushbabies!! They're SO cute, always wanted one as a pet when I was kid and didn't understand that was impossible. Yeah the classic big hairy tattooed weapon loving Biker shocked by the death of Bushbabies! ...
Humans have a mind. They can plan.
It is possible for humans to run down some prey. I've done it myself. About 55 years ago. A young goat. (All right, two young goats, but one of us died and it wasn't me. ) And a flying leap from above. I wouldn't recommend it though. Only luck, prevented injury.
What is more natural than to grab a stick to knock fruit off a tree? Because our arms are too short. How many of you have done that without even thinking about it?
It is also possible to herd some animals to a spot where the advantage turns better for humans. So long as there is a group of you to do it.
Is that how tribes originated? better hunting better protection?
Just because humanity back then was young. It doesn't mean they were dumb. What they lacked was knowledge. Not the ability to gain it. Or critique what they did and wonder how to do better. We wouldn't have, what we have without that ability.
How did they start to use copper and bronze? What bright spark showed someone, molten metal? 🙂
Who took soggy clay and cooked it? Or was it seeing what happened when baking food?
Where is Dr Who and the Tardis when you need him? I'd love to go back for a look see.
20:48 Why are they using both types of spear?... Let's not overlook good old fashioned laziness. I can just hear one of ancesters saying to Ug The Progressive who is advocating adding a stone tip to a wooden spear... "But it works... So I'm NOT going to fix it!"