300,000 year old spears

[Ernie L]

I believe this gets regurgitated every couple of years..at least it looks like the same old blurry picture.. i want more..better pictures..some technical analysis ...what type of wood are they made of ?..any points? blood/dna ?...I'm not getting any younger.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 085535.htm

[hardaker]

from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schöningen_Spears

"Description
The spears, deformed by the load of the sediment pressure, are made from slim, straight spruce stems – except for spear IV which is made from pine wood. Their dimensions are between 1.8 and 2.5 metres.

They have been worked very thoroughly and are evidence of highly developed technological skills and of workmanlike tradition. Like in today’s tournament javelins, the greatest diameter and therefore its centre of gravity is in the front third of the shaft. The tips are worked symmetrically from the base of the stems, the end of the tips were worked beside the medullary ray, the weakest part of the stem, on purpose.

In their throwing qualities, the wooden Schoeningen spears are equal to today’s tournament javelins. During tests, athletes could throw true to original replicas up to 70 metres.[8][9] The choice of the wood is likely to be climatically determined, because during the cooler climate near the end of the interglacial, conifers grew close to the site of the finds.[10]

Other discoveries

More unique wooden artefacts were found at the place of discovery of the wild horse hunting camp: a charred wooden staff (skewer) as well as a wooden tool, tapered at both ends, interpreted as a throwing stick.[11] The stone tools at the place of discovery consist of different scraper-shaped and pointed forms. Evidence of blank production is missing; much retouched debris proves the reworking of the brought-along tools.

Also sensational are the so called grooved wooden tools, excavated at the place of discovery no. 12. Made from the extremely hard wooden branch-bases of the European silver fir and noticeably incised at one end, they may have been used as a mounting for stone blades. If this interpretation is correct, they are the oldest composite tools of mankind.[11]

Thanks to the good preservation conditions, at the place of discovery there are many finds of small animals, among them small mammals, fish, molluscs and insects. Together with the carpological remains they make a detailed reconstruction of the climate and the environment of the passing of an interglacial possible."

Schöningen has it all, and its inside the Arctic Circle, 61 degrees(?). Search it out. Its worth it. A total gamechanger. Hopefully someone is up on the latest.

[Ernie L]

from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schöningen_Spears

"Description
The spears, deformed by the load of the sediment pressure, are made from slim, straight spruce stems – except for spear IV which is made from pine wood. Their dimensions are between 1.8 and 2.5 metres.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Schöningen has it all, and its inside the Arctic Circle, 61 degrees(?). Search it out. Its worth it. A total gamechanger. Hopefully someone is up on the latest.

Thank you very much Mr. Hardaker.That was just what I was looking for
.........It would appear Mr. Heidelberg was a clever fellow. I know this is not novel to me but my intuition tells me that a very ancient non stone based world of tools and architecture existed....and no post holes such as those at wood henge to give a clue. The skills needed to conceive and construct Göbekli Tepe sprang out of thin air ?

[Barracuda]

Thanks! Very interesting addition to the orginal story from the NEWS page

[Minimalist]

More unique wooden artefacts were found at the place of discovery of the wild horse hunting camp: a charred wooden staff (skewer) as well as a wooden tool, tapered at both ends, interpreted as a throwing stick.

So, why would brutish cavemen who could only thrust with their spears waste all this time devising what is, in effect, a javelin?

Could it be that yet another paradigm is falling?

[Ernie L]

More unique wooden artefacts were found at the place of discovery of the wild horse hunting camp: a charred wooden staff (skewer) as well as a wooden tool, tapered at both ends, interpreted as a throwing stick.

So, why would brutish cavemen who could only thrust with their spears waste all this time devising what is, in effect, a javelin?

Could it be that yet another paradigm is falling?

They only scavenged and did not hunt live prey. They really did not have the power of speech nor intellectual capabilities to coordinate a group hunt....Those purposefully designed and skillfully crafted shafts were really spits..they were used to BBQ the rotten dead corpses they were lucky enough to stumble upon.

And pay no attention to the fact that only the very end of the shaft was charred. Don't let anyone try to tell you the shaft makers knew enough to flame harden the point of the shaft.

[hardaker]

"The skills needed to conceive and construct Göbekli Tepe sprang out of thin air ?"
Civilization resulted from magic mushrooms.

[uniface]

The Darwinian Caveman, "up" from whom we supposedly "evolved" was one of the great frauds of the 19th century.

So successful that it endured throughout the 20th and briefly into the 21st.

[Minimalist]

Nice try, uni!

[uniface]

Simple fact.

EITHER people were sailing the ocean long before they were "Homo Sapiens" (a designation open to dispute) OR the Space Brothers were dropping them off in places like Australia and Crete.

Your choice.

I thought so.

[Ernie L]

Simple fact.

EITHER people were sailing the ocean long before they were "Homo Sapiens" (a designation open to dispute) OR the Space Brothers were dropping them off in places like Australia and Crete.

Your choice.

I thought so.

......Cretan Bull ...err I mean Cretan land bridge perhaps ? .... .hmmm....This could be a niche position for someone.

.......or the ever popular swept out to sea (whole viable breading populations) and made landfall before we died of sun stroke or dehydration option.

[kbs2244]

One nice thing about the latest Goggle Earth images is that they show an pretty good idea of the ocean bottom.
Continental shelves, drop offs, trenches and such.

While I am not enough of a geek to try and find out if they can show beach levels at various points it time( and I would want real good evidence on whose models that would be based on) it does give a rough idea of how far and over what kind of water early sailors would have encountered.

[hardaker]

Just in, w/ reference to the 400k spears.

Discovery: Humans hunted for meat 1.6 million years earlier than previously thought
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/09/23/d ... y-thought/

"“We know that humans ate meat two million years ago,” said Bunn, who was speaking in Bordeaux at the annual meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE). “What was not clear was the source of that meat. However, we have compared the type of prey killed by lions and leopards today with the type of prey selected by humans in those days. This has shown that men and women could not have been taking kill from other animals or eating those that had died of natural causes. They were selecting and killing what they wanted.”

That finding has major implications, he added. “Until now the oldest, unambiguous evidence of human hunting has come from a 400,000-year-old site in Germany where horses were clearly being speared and their flesh eaten. We have now pushed that date back to around two million years ago.”

cf.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Discove ... 38&bih=454

[circumspice]

The return of man the hunter
by Henry Gee

The old concept of Stone-Age Man as a proficient big-game hunter has come in for a lot of criticism in recent years. Patient re-examination of supposed ancient kill sites, comparative studies of modern hunter-gatherer peoples (and, it must be said, a certain amount of political correctness) has turned macho and musclebound Palaeolithic hunters into sorry scavengers of everyone else's left-overs.

This could all change with a truly astonishing archaeological find from Germany, reported in the 27 February 1997 Nature. Dr Hartmut Thieme describes three wooden spears recovered from a lignite mine at Schöningen, about 100 km east of Hannover. The spears are each carefully carved from a single trunk of spruce, about two metres long, shaped and balanced for throwing in the manner of modern javelins, and 400,000 years old. This makes them the oldest wooden hunting weapons ever found. "Wooden finds like these would be sensational if only 3000 years old; ones a hundred times older are almost unimaginable" says Professor Robin Dennell of the University of Sheffield.

The spears come from an ancient 'living floor' and are accompanied by stone tools and the bones of horses and other animals. Many of the horse bones show signs of deliberate butchery, and there is even a hint of a hearth. Could this be the remains of a hunting camp? The implications of the Schöningen finds for our picture of early human behaviour are profound. The spears show that even at this early date, people approached problems with a great deal of foresight. The carvers of the spears didn't have a "five-minute culture", hunting a horse by lobbing the nearest rock at it. They maintained a clear mental picture of the requirements of successful hunting for weeks or months before the hunt, clear enough to select the appropriate tree and fell it, and to age and prepare the wood with the final purpose in mind: making a hunting spear. Just like javelin, the business ends of the spears are broad and pointed, and made from the bases of the trees: the densest, heaviest part of the wood, just right for maintaining a true trajectory in flight, and for maximum effect on impact. The tail ends are slender and tapering.

The Schöningen spears are not the first evidence of Palaeolithic wooden hunting weapons, even if they are the most convincing. In 1948, a 125,000-year-old wooden spear was found inside an elephant skeleton at Lehringen, also in Germany: in 1911, the tip of what might have been a spear was found at Clacton in England, in deposits similar in age to those of Schöningen. At the time, these finds were interpeted as weapons.

But since the 1960s, careful reexamination has cast doubt on these interpretations. Comparative anthropological studies on modern hunter-gatherer people has shown how it is the gathering by women, rather than the hunting by men, that supplies more (and more reliable) calories for the tribe as a whole. Careful study of many of the supposed stone-age hunting sites has raised the possibility that humans could easily have scavenged carcases killed by other animals as hunted them down themselves.

Perhaps most persuasively, evidence has emerged, mainly from the study of stone tools, that early humans were unable to think and plan with the depth and strategy necessary to hunt big game such as horses, bison and mammoths. They made tools in a more instinctive way, in the same way that birds make nests. Either that, or they made tools on the spur of the moment, for disposable, once-only use. Something as carefully crafted as a hunting javelin would have been out of the question. This all changed around 40,000 years ago, when the appearance of cave paintings, sculptures and worked implements of bone and antler provide evidence for the appearance of what we today would understand as a modern way of thinking.

In this light the ancient spears from Lehringen and Clacton were reinterpreted as digging sticks, or possibly probes to find carcasses buried under snow. The purpose of the Schöningen spears is, however, unambiguous. Says Dennell: "to regard them as snow-probes or digging sticks is like claiming that power drills are paperweights".

In a wider context, the new discovery tells us something very profound about the makers of the tools. Most researchers think that Europe before about 500,000 years ago was extremely sparsely populated. The earliest evidence we have consist of a rich haul of skeletons from a cave at Atapuerca, Spain, dating from as long ago as 780,000 years ago. Other ancient remains are known from France, Italy, Spain, England and Germany. After around 300,000 years ago, these early Europeans are clearly Neanderthals. The identities of the earlier ones are less clear, but some seem to have been the ancestors of Neanderthals.

Most people agree, however, that the first residents of Europe were only distantly related to the modern humans who appeared in Europe 40,000 years ago, possibly from western Asia, bringing their art and technology with them. It is easy to condemn what Dr Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London calls the 'ancients', such as Neanderthals, as dull-witted by comparison with the 'moderns' that came later.[/b] The evidence of the spears from Schöningen suggests that this view is mistaken. The ancients seem to have been hunters of considerable mental and physical skill. The rarity of ancient wooden implements of any kind shows how little we really know about the material culture of long-vanished peoples, and how concentrating on the few aspects we have left (such as stone tools) may be seriously misleading.[/b]

© Macmillan Magazines Ltd. ‹ NATURE NEWS SERVICE 1996

Note: This science update from the Nature News Service would normally be mounted on the Nature site. By special permission, the update is mounted on this Web page while the Nature page is being revised.

http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/cowen/ ... pears.html

[Farpoint]

Coincidences, on the spur of the moment a few weeks ago, I happened to stop in at one of the reduced price book stores and acquired a copy of Robin Dennell's "The Paleolithic Settlement of Asia", with a remainder mark on the bottom. Subsequently, the Valsequillo thread and this one make the book entirely relevant and on point. I'm about half way through it.

WEIRD!!