The Ancients - The First Spears

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

According to the work of today's guest, Dr Annemieke Milks, humans were using spears approximately 400,000 years ago. Thanks to fragments of wooden spears incredibly well preserved at sites like Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, and Schöningen in Germany, there's now evidence to show our early ancestors weren't just hunter gatherers, but skilled weapons users.Together, Tristan and Annemieke dissect what the evidence actually shows, the speculation surrounding ancestors millions of years ago also using weapons, and how experimental archaeology holds the key to unlocking the secrets of our ancestors lives.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.For more ancient content, subscribe to our Ancient History Thursday newsletter here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we're talking all about the first known spears from the archaeological record. We're going back a few hundred thousand years to a time when Neanderthal communities were prominent in Europe. We're going to be covering sites such as Schöningen in Germany where archaeologists have uncovered incredibly well preserved remains of wooden spears some 300,000 years old. Now to talk all about these weapons and what we know

about these early spears so far, well I was delighted to head up to the University of Reading a couple of weeks back to interview the researcher Dr Anamika Milks. Now Anamika, she's a world expert when it comes to these early spears, and she's also delved into the world of experimental archaeology too. She and her team have been testing out replicas of these wooden spears, seeing how they would have been most effectively used by these prehistoric communities for hunting. This really was a great and fun chat to do. We had replicas in front of us as we talked. I really do hope you enjoy. And here's Anamika.

Anamika, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. It's really, really a pleasure to be here. Thank you. We've got in front of us this array of artifacts. When talking about these early spears, I did not realise that humans were using spears hundreds of thousands of years ago. Yeah, it is actually extraordinary. And the only reason that we even know for sure that they were doing that is because we have a few sites that have just extraordinary preservation of wood. Normally, wood wouldn't preserve archaeologically, especially not that old,

but there's just a handful of sites where it did. And we were lucky enough to just have this amazing picture, insight into what hominins were doing three, 400,000 years ago, maybe older. And so why is it so rare that wooden implements like spears would survive in the archaeological record. The problem is something we call the tyranny of the tangible, right? And so we don't have good preservation of a lot of organics. And in particular, we don't have good preservation of plant materials. So something like wood would rot away quite quickly, usually. There are a few preservation conditions where we do get wood preservation. So

under the water table in basically anaerobic conditions where the wood won't decay, sometimes in some very dry environments, and then sometimes in frozen contexts. And so we're starting to see some things coming out of the Arctic ice patches, which are amazing. So yeah, usually it would just decay away before. So we end up seeing it archaeologically. And that's why what we see in the archaeological record from the Paleolithic is primarily stone tools. Why we call it the Stone Age is because we see the stone tools they preserve, but we're not seeing what they're doing organically. Well, let's delve into the spears, first of all. So you mentioned this is 300,000, 400,000 years ago but if we go back even further in time do we have any speculative evidence in

the archaeological record for the use of spears before this time? I would say so. Up until the discovery of these spears basically the idea was that hominins were primarily scavenging and probably weren't very capable hunters. But the discovery in particular of the site where these are replicated from, from Schöningen in Germany, really changed that picture. And people started to sort of really understand that humans were hunting during the Pleistocene. during the Pleistocene. The indirect evidence that we have without the weapons themselves goes back quite a long way, possibly as much as one and a half, two million years in Africa. It's extraordinary. And we can see this from the physiology of the hominins themselves, thinking that they were probably eating meat and animal products, but also capable of running long distances, homo erectus. And so we

infer from that and from the faunal record where we see cut marks on bones that humans were probably starting to hunt. And in order to hunt, humans need tools, right? We don't have the characteristics of the predators. We don't have speed. We don't have sharp canines. We don't have really the ability to capture prey like a lion would. So we have to use some sort of technology to be hunting with. And if we keep on this speculative evidence a bit longer, because you've got these replica skulls in front of you here, which of these skulls refers to this time, you know, before the actual first evidence we have of spears? Yeah, so this is a skull, for example, of Homo ergaster, an African specimen. And basically what we infer from the

archaeological and paleoanthropological record is that ergaster Homo erectus was a tall and lean hominin, completely bipedal by this point, probably capable of pursuit hunting and certainly meat eating. So although it's a small brain in comparison to Neanderthals or Homo sapiens, we think that they're starting to develop some of these behaviors that really define us as human. And do we have any potential evidence for use of weapons alongside them? Or do we just think because they have that capability, that they could have been using something like a spear that far back in human prehistory? That's a great question. I think so some people would argue that we don't have clear evidence that they were making any sort of weaponry. Whereas other people, and I think I would probably include myself in that category, think that it's likely they had some sort of technology to be doing that with.

What exactly that looked like, whether that looked anything like the much later spears we have from Eurasia, we don't know. chimpanzee groups in Fongoli will sharpen sticks and they will use those to probe into holes and capture bush babies, which they then predate upon. So this is a behavior, the basic concept of sharpening a stick in order to use that to hunt is something that chimpanzees are capable of. And so the idea that Homo ergaster or Homo erectus would also have been capable of something similar or slightly more sophisticated to me is something that is, yeah, it's indirect evidence, but I think it's fairly obvious that they were capable hunters. Because the creating of something like even a very simple spear, like, you know, a piece of wood with a sharp tip, of all types of weapon imp even a very simple spear, like, you know, a piece of wood with a sharp tip. Yeah.

Of all types of weapon implements, this does almost feel like one of the earliest that a human would surely develop of all the types of weapons that we have today. Absolutely. It is a simple concept. You take a piece of wood, a trunk or a branch, and you sharpen it in order to puncture an animal of some sort, or a person if you're being violent. What we can say about a site like Schöningen is that actually the design is much more sophisticated than that. So what you would think of when you see one of these chimpanzee, you know, sticks that they sharpen with their teeth is very, very, very different to what we see at Schöningen, at Clacton, at Schöningen, Leringen. These are, although they're simple in the sense that they're not composite, you don't have an added stone point,

they are actually really beautifully made, beautifully designed objects. It's not just a sharpened stick. Well, you mentioned sites there like Clacton and Schöningen, so let's have a look at these sites now, sites there like Clacton and Shurningen. So let's have a look at these sites now, especially when we talk about the first physical evidence that we think we have for a spear. Where is this evidence? What is this evidence? So the first evidence of an actual weapon comes from Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, which is amazing, I think. And it was discovered in 1911 by a geologist, Samuel Hazel Dean Warren. And he contributed a lot to our understanding of British geology and developing that field. And he was keeping an eye on these freshwater deposits in Clacton. And in so doing, he found this broken point of a yew branch, or it's possibly a trunk,

I think that analysis hasn't quite been done yet. But at any rate, he found this eroding out of the cliff, out of these freshwater deposits at Clacton. It's broken, broken in antiquity. And he, you know, it's just this extraordinary discovery, probably the earliest, at least in Eurasia, that we have of a weapon. And how much of the spear therefore survives? Can we really say accurately that we think that this is 100% a spear? Yeah, I mean, that, so it is a good question. It is a fragment and not a complete weapon like we see at Schöningen. And so because of that, there have been some debates as to its function. It was made of yew wood, which is a very difficult wood to work because it's very hard. And it's also a type of wood that's been selected for weapons throughout time. And that's because, partly because of its flexibility and also because it's very, very dense. And so it doesn't break, it can bend. So the amount of weight, I think, or force that would be needed

to break something like that would be quite a lot. So something broke this tool with a lot of force. So that would be the first argument for it being a weapon and not another sort of type of tool like a digging stick for digging up tubers or something like that. Or what was suggested in the 1980s is when everyone thought the hominins were only capable of scavenging, that this might have been some sort of a snow probe to locate carcasses. It's the peak of an interglacial, very warm period anyway. So I think it has those aspects in favor of being a spear, a broken spear point. It is quite large compared to the later wooden spears that we see from archaeological sites. We also have a lot of examples of ethnographic wooden spears, of people using wooden spears right through to recent times for hunting and for violence.

There are very clear tool marks on the piece that show that it was shaped with a purpose, to be shaped into a point. You might not do that if it was, say, a more expedient tool like a digging stick. So I think that there are various aspects of this object that point to it being a spear. There's one other possibility that I think is interesting and possible, which has been discussed for a while, which was that it could have been a game stake of some sort. So for digging a pit and then a stake in the pit, or potentially even stuck in the ground,

we know that ethnographically again, spears would be stuck in the ground and the animal would impale itself on this stick. So that is a possibility. I think in the back of my mind, sometimes I think, yeah, it could have been a game stake. That's still a weapon in a way. It's just not used in quite the same way, a hunting

technology. It's so interesting you say that we've got that fragment of potentially a spear from Clacton. Yeah. The wider context of that discovery, were there any other artifacts discovered alongside the spear tip? So the general archaeological deposits have something called the Clactonian industry, which is a very simple flake technology. It's not like the more sophisticated, what we think of as more sophisticated handaxe technologies, which were present at the time at other sites and earlier. But at Clacton, we just have this very simple sort of you know for example just flakes that might have been used for butchery for woodworking or even flaked flakes so you see you might have a notch and that could be used Clactonian notches have been suggested to be

used for woodworking for crafting a spear yeah for carving a spear. So weirdly, at the archaeological sites where we have spears, we have really simple lithic technologies, the flake technologies, and not the hand axes. So they're never associated together. I mean, there's so few sites with wooden spears in the Pleistocene. But still, I find that, personally, I find that really intriguing that we have this sort of more simple lithic technology, but this really sophisticated organics. Absolutely. And it always shows the capability of these people and how they are able to carve stuff out with even really simple stone tools. These Clactonian people, do we know who they were as into what human group? Yeah. I mean, that's a big can of worms. I wouldn't put my money on it at the moment.

There's the possibility. So some would say that 400,000 years ago in Europe, we're looking at Homo hadrobrigensis. Some people would move away from Homo hadrobrigensis and say that we're looking at early Neanderthals in Europe at the time. So this is an example of one of these debated specimens. This is from Cima de los Huesos in Spain, the Pit of the Bones, one of many specimens at that site of hominins which were found down a pit. And there are early Neanderthal characteristics in this sample around the same time as Clacton, about 400,000, 430,000. So I think we have an idea of the hominins that it could have been, but we don't have

hominin remains associated at Clacton. And there is also the possibility that we have multiple species of hominins around in Europe at the time, and we're just not clear on which specimens are which species, or if they're all quite close in a species sense. A bit of a debate, basically, what species we have at Clacton. So there's still quite a lot of mystery surrounding the Clacton spear and the people who created it. I still find it fascinating to say the earliest physical evidence of a spear, potentially a spear, that we have is from Clacton, all the places in the world. And if we move on, therefore, you mentioned Schöningen, which seems to be this really

interesting site with these amazing wooden spears preserved. How far forward are we going from Clacton to get to Schöningen and these spears that have been preserved? So it's a full interglacial cycle later. Schöningen is now dated to approximately 300,000 years ago. There's actually quite a lot of different sites at Schöningen. So it's not just the Speer Horizon where we find all the wooden remains. There's hominins were using this lakeshore over a very long period of time. But the particular horizon where we see the spears is called the spear, nicknamed the Spear Horizon, and at that site it was a lake shore and we see these 10 wooden spears at the site in quite a concentrated area. They were,

nine of them were made of spruce, one of them was made of pine. So quite similar, very, very dense, slow growing spruce. It was a cold period. It was the end of the interglacial, so it was cooling down, quite an open environment. And we also have two throwing sticks from that site. So these are shorter, double pointed sticks that we think they threw like that rotationally at prey, rather than throwing than either throwing overhand or thrusting. So really, really a whole assemblage of tools at the site. We've got the simple flake tools that I mentioned with evidence of woodworking. And we've got lots and lots of butchered animals, large animals like horses and red deer.

So we think that they were using this lake shore site to hunt, using these weapons. Why they left them behind is a question that is being thought about and worked on. But yeah, so these are both replicas of one of the complete spears spear two and uh yeah these have been used in in experiments let's have a look at this so i wonder how best to kind of hold this maybe do you want to hold one of these stuff like that and go like that so i mean because kind of talk us through it obviously this is a podcast as well as visual so what does this spear two is shunning and what does it consist of? Is it just one piece of wood? Is it? Yeah. Okay.

So do you want to hold it? I'll look into it. All right. Okay. So you can, so basically you can see that this is a tool that double tapers at both ends. The shunning and spears were all made of a trunk, not from branches and it balances more or less in the middle.

And the center of gravity is towards the front. And because of that, they fly. Most of them. So we haven't replicated all of the spears. I've used always a replica of spear two, because it's in the sort of the average length and diameter. So I've picked that one as and it's complete. So we can really replicate it quite nicely. So they do fly, but that doesn't mean that they were only used as throwing spears to me, like a javelin. So they can be thrown as a javelin. And we've done experiments that show that. And so you would hold it over. I'm not a javelin athlete, but you would hold it over overhead like that and throw overhand like this.

But it can also be used as a thrusting spear. And we've replicated that in experiments as well. And they're functional as both. So to my thinking, there's been a big debate, you know, were they thrown or not? Were they thrusted only? To me, they're quite multifunctional tools. You know, they're quite long.

A sharp pointy stick is useful for lots of different things, right? It's not just probably either a hunting tool, you might want it for self-defense in the environment. Also a really important thing if you're gonna survive. That's quite interesting because this has got almost a small tip here, and that's almost like a counterbalance, isn't it?

So we think that is definitely the tip of the spear, which would be thrust or thrown into say probably a hunting site, so probably an animal. Yeah, so and we don't have any hunting lesions yet at Schöningen. They haven't found any evidence on the animal bones that show that it was impacted with a spear, but scores of butchered horses for example. Again in experiments we've shown that these types of spears are capable of creating a lethal wound on an animal like a horse. So it is a functional tool. It isn't an ineffective weapon. aeroplanes space suits condoms coffee plastic surgery warships over on the patented podcast by history hit we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions

and the people who claim these ideas as their own we uncover exceptional stories behind everyday objects. We managed to put two men on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. Unpack invention myths. So the prince's widow immediately becomes certain. Thomas Edison stole her husband's invention and her husband disappeared around the same time. Can only have been eliminated by Thomas Edison, who at the time is arguably the most famous person in the West. And look backwards to understand technologies that are still in progress. You know, when people turn around to me and say, oh, why would you want to live forever? Life's rubbish. I just think that's a bit sad. I think it's a worthwhile thing to do. And the thing that really makes it worthwhile is the fact that you could make

it go on forever. So subscribe to Patented from History Hit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to catch new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. Let's focus on that weapon testing with spears such as this that you hinted at right there and showing very well showing physically with these spears from all the testing that you've done what was the most effective way do you think for these people to have used one of these spears oh i mean i think the most effective way is what you're being asked to to do it in that moment right so i mean a thrusting more or less they're equally effective as thrusting and thrown weapons. But if you are hunting in a group and throwing from maybe 15 to 20 meters from these animals, which is the distances we've shown they could be accurate to, you might throw a series of spears as a group at an animal, disadvantage it, wound it, and then you might

come in and finish it off with a thrust. And it's that sort of strategy that I think suggests these are multifunctional. So it's not necessarily that you would bring that animal down with a blow to the heart with the first throw. That might be possible, but that would be quite a lucky shot. But more that throwing would be part of a strategy for hunting these larger animals. And the throwing sticks may be part of that too. So maybe they would throw the throwing sticks at the legs of the animals. This is something we know ethnographically. People will use wooden throwing sticks and hunting sticks to hunt animals like reindeer and dowker, things like that. So it might be all part of a

package of communal hunting, everybody taking part. One of the things I think is really cool about Schöningen, because we have a sample of spears and not just one, is that we have different sizes of spears, right? Some of them are really big. Spear 6 is massive. It's really, really huge. spear 6 is massive it's really really huge and then spear 10 is shorter it's thinner and it would be lighter to throw or thrust with and to my thinking we have this idea right that it's always the males who are doing the hunting because they're more powerful physiques and the women are doing more of the gathering and looking after the young. But actually, if you have a range of different types of weapons, we could think about the participation of the entire community,

including the females and including children. Again, this is something that we do see ethnographically. Women do hunt. It's rarer, but they do hunt. ethnographically women do hunt. It's rarer, but they do hunt. And children absolutely start to learn to use tools like spears from a very young age, from maybe three, four years old. So maybe these different sizes of weapons are hinting at a wider kind of community of engagement in hunting and not just the larger adult males. Because that is something we sometimes overlook, isn't it? The importance of every single person in one of these hunter-gatherer communities which wouldn't be massive communities but in almost you mentioned earlier that multi-functional nature is something

like this how everyone in a community they would have to know how to do various different jobs yeah whether it was wielding a spear thrusting a spear or butchering or gathering or whatever, and learning from a young age. So actually, that variety in size might give us more of an insight into that kind of complex society, those large variety of needs that were essential for the survival of these hunter-gatherer groups. I think that's absolutely right. And I think for me, that aspect of learning and skills is really where I'm going next with my sort of thinking on these tools is what can we, you know, okay, it's this big or it can be thrown or thrust. Fine, you know, multifunctional tools. What's really fascinating is what people are doing with it and what they have to learn

in order to survive. And we know from contemporary hunter-gatherer societies that learning something like hunting with a spear takes a long period of time, right? Humans, one of the things that makes us so interesting is we have this very long period of development, of child and adolescent development compared to other species. And something like learning how to nap, how to butcher, how to throw or thrust with a spear in order to survive are really key skills. And they're skills that take gross and fine motor skill development, probably fine tuning in the brain to get exactly that accuracy, but also a physiological development of the muscles that you might need in order to use those tools effectively.

So yeah, I think they signify really that long period of investment that we have that makes us human. Yeah, actually, the sample at Schoeningen is something incredibly unique because we have more than just one. More than just one, as you mentioned, 10, which is incredible. And do we have any idea where these people got this wood or got the wood for these spears from? How much of a task that was? We have some idea of where it might have come from. So at the site, they've done various pollen studies, which suggest that there wasn't spruce growing nearby. So we don't think that they were getting the spruce itself at the site. potentially one area would have been the the nearby mountains about 40 kilometers away and one reason why we think this is because the wood itself is very very slow growing as I mentioned so if you have a little bit more altitude you get poorer growing conditions in this really really dense annual rings so we can see from so this is just just a bit of modern U wood from some work I was doing to

make some U points. So it's not the same type of wood, but you can see the annual ring distance here between the rings. And by looking at CT scans, really high quality CT scans, and also looking at cross sections where the spears are broken, because they are broken taphonomically, they're broken after they were buried, we can sort of tell exactly how dense and slow growing the rings are. And in some cases, as little as 0.2 millimeters of growth per year on this wood, which is really, really slow. So yeah, perhaps they were bringing the wood from a distance and woodworking at the site. An alternative is that they were working the spears and crafting the spears farther away and then just bringing them to Schöningen to hunt at the site and maybe doing a bit of

repair or recycling of the spears if they get a bit damaged. That's amazing, isn't it? When you do have wood survive, how much you can learn from the woods, dendrochronology and all of this dating, isn't it? To learn more about the date of the object, but also about the landscape that this object was created into. It's so extraordinary. Yeah, wood is, I know it sounds really boring as a material, but actually it has a whole, it has so many stories to tell. Another really exciting, I think, fascinating aspect of the spears at Schöningen is that the hominins definitely had an idea of the material properties of wood. And we know this because all of the points, the front points, have the center of the trunk, which is called the pith,

offset from the very tip. So instead, so the pith in a tree or a branch is always softer. And so they always avoided that center coming out at the very tip. Oh, in all the cases, which I think is amazing. You know, it's not just chance then, to my thinking, that's a design feature of the spears with the knowledge that it will blunt more easily if they put the pith right at the tip. So they offset it slightly. So this is an example of how these are not just chimpanzee-style sharpened sticks. They are sophisticated designed objects. There's real method in their creation.

Yeah. And do we know who these people were 300,000 years ago living by this lakeside at Schöningen today? Do we know who these people were that created these spears? So it's the same answer as for Claxton because we don't have any hominin remains yet from Schöningen. I think everyone sort of hoped we might, after decades of excavation, find human remains. But unfortunately, we don't have a human signature. They have just recently published some footprints from a

different site, not from the sphere horizon at Shining Inn. We know humans were there, but exactly which humans, whether you want to call them Homo hadelbergensis or whether you want to call them early Neanderthals is an area of debate. To my thinking, a lot of aspects of their technology are pointing us to subsequent periods where we start to see a more sort of middle Paleolithic Neanderthal type technology. And I think we can see this in the spears themselves. Well, let's move on or maybe keep on churning in a bit longer if we do have examples of it because I notice also we've got this incredible artifact here. Now Anamika, what exactly is this? Okay so this is a replica of a stone-tipped spear using a Lavalois point. And this particular one was used in some friction experiments

a couple of weeks ago at Kent State University's Experimental Archaeology Lab. And we know that in subsequent interglacials, early Neanderthals, we're starting to use a technology called Lavalois, which is here, I have this example here. Yes. So you see, so a Lavalois has a sort of prepared core technology where they will create a sort of core where they end up with a flake or a point in the case of these. So that is the product that they use. So they prepared the core ahead of time rather than just striking off a single flake.

It's prepared so that the flake will come off in a specific shape and size. And so from some sites in both Europe and also in the Near East, we have these sort of Lavalois points, which we think may have started to be used to tip spears. So they were using them for other things too, knives and other types of tools, but potentially they started tipping their spears with stones about 230,000 years ago, something like that. Sites like Biège Saint-Vast, for example. Here's an example of an unhaften Lavalois point, for example. It's quite similar, isn't it? It's in that pointy top.

Yeah, exactly. So determining whether it was used as a weapon is a bit of a tricky business, but there are a few sites where we think that Neanderthals started adding stone points to their spears. It's really important to note, though, that they didn't stop making wooden spears, right? Okay.

So they kept on making wooden spears as well. There's a later site called Laringan, which dates to about 125,000 years ago, where there's a complete yew spear found in association with a butchered elephant, a straight-tossed elephant, which is an enormous animal. So wooden spears continue to be made, but potentially they start using stone-tipped spears as well. In Africa, it's earlier. So that's where the picture gets a bit complicated. In Africa, they might have been starting to use stone points as early as 500,000 years ago. So that's quite a big difference, right? Yeah. So very, almost quite similar to the evolution of humans with the evolution of spears. It's not a straight line as sometimes we like to think, linear straight line. Wooden spears are still being created at the same time now that we start seeing lithic points on top of wooden shafts.

Yeah. Why are they doing that? Why are they doing both at the same time? In what context would you want a wooden spear as opposed to a stone-tipped spear? Is there some sort of functional advantage of one over the other? Or is it more of a cultural tradition? So these are, to my mind, really interesting questions about that innovation and transition. And as I mentioned, we've got, you know, there's examples of communities who hunted with wooden spears very effectively up until recent times. Aboriginal Tasmanians hunted with untipped wooden spears. They hunted kangaroo and wallaby. and they also used them in violent encounters. And the tiwi were the same, the tiwi from Melville Island.

So there are examples of wooden spears used globally. So why have this persistence of wooden spears? You know, the idea used to be, I think, that wooden spears were ineffective as a hunting tool. But to my mind, if something persists, there's a reason for that persistence of a technology. So I like to think of this as one of the oldest persistent technologies in the human story. So how long is it, therefore, between Schöningen and Laringen? Probably about 175,000 years. Well, there you go.

So it's a big gap, isn't it? So laryngin is, again, in a warm interglacial period. In association with a butchered elephant seems to me pretty good evidence that Neanderthals were using wooden spears for hunting. Exactly. And it must be a further testament to the effectiveness of a weapon like this. With a hunter-gatherer community where they would be using things that are effective because that whole livelihoods are based around that further evidence of that i did say you wanted to keep on shunning in a bit more earlier and the reason why as we went on to the lithic tips do we therefore find no potential evidence at all of lithic tips being at a site like Schöningen?

No, not as of yet. There certainly are some retouched flake tools that were used probably, as I say, in butchery and woodworking and other tasks. But I think at Schöningen, we've got the preservation. So if they were adding a stone point to a spear, we'd see it. We also don't have clear evidence yet until a little bit later that they were making and using glues. And so to add a stone point to a handle or a spear for, you know, hafting it for any reason, you need some sort of glue. And the early evidence for glue is also around the same period that we start to see the stone points that we think they may have been using for weapon points. And in regards to the function of these spears, as we start to wrap up, because of the butchered

animal remains that you find in these sites from 300,000, 150,000 years ago, does their primary purpose, rather than, let's say, in our minds thinking of maybe the origins of warfare or something like that? The purpose of spears like these is for hunting prey and not other humans. It's a really tricky question to answer for sure, because it's one of those things that probably doesn't leave a big archaeological signal. But to my thinking, we are always finding these spears in association with butchered animals. Humans are thin on the ground, and there probably isn't a whole lot of reason to have violent encounters. That doesn't to say that that didn't happen, but we certainly aren't seeing it in anything like on the scale of what we might call

warfare. Would they have been a good effective weapon against a human as well as a horse? Yes, if that was necessary. But again, we just don't, we don't see evidence on the hominin remains of weapon use for the most part. There's an example from Sima de los Huesos, where there may have been two repeated impacts to the front of one of the skulls, which could signify, I think, human violence. But for the most part, we don't see that scale of violence until really much, much later, Homo sapiens, end of the late Pleistocene. So yeah, I think they're primarily hunting tools. But it's important to think about, as we mentioned earlier, sort of self-defense. The Schöningen hominins are sharing the landscape

with saber-toothed cats, right? Homotherium latidans. And these are very dangerous animals. They actually used a humerus of one of these, Homotherium, as a napping tool at shining in as well so we know that they're sharing a landscape at the same time and they're also predating on the same animals and so i think you know a sharp pointy long stick is a really nice thing to have when you've got these dangerous animals around too so self-defense would be really important as well these are such amazing examples from our deep human prehistory to survive. I know we've got the replicas here today or the ones, these recreations that you've overseen the making of today, and they are absolutely stunning. Do we have any idea roughly for how long wooden spears

remain in existence by in the use of upper Paleolithic or mid-Paleolithic communities? I mean, we don't. So middle Paleolithic, yes, because we've got the example from Laringan, but the preservation is just so, so rare. My expectation is that there is a continuity of use of wooden spears. There's certainly a continuity of use of hunting spears in general, right through to the present day. And so we don't have evidence that there was a continuity of use, but I think to my mind it makes sense that wooden

spears continued to play a role in the hunting kit that hominins had and our own species had right the way through. And you of course have done a lot of work with regards to experimental archaeology in testing out the effectiveness, the use of these very early spears. How important is that, experimental archaeology, using replicas like these to get more of a sense of how they would have been used hundreds of thousands of years ago? Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, experimental archaeology is just really good fun. I absolutely recommend it. But it also is an important scientific method that we have to test out the possibilities of technologies. The point of the experiments was never to say for sure what happened in the past, but to understand the possibilities, right, the range

of possibilities. So we tested them in a number of different ways. We worked with extremely good quality throwers. So we worked with javelin athletes to throw replicas to better understand how they fly, how they could hit a target and what sort of distance. We worked with martial arts specialists to understand how they would work as a thrusting spear. So these were people who had a lot of experience in spear and knife technologies. And we worked with military personnel as well, who used the replicas again in thrusting experiments because British military personnel are trained in bayonet stabbing. So we tried to select people who had experience in some way. And then we've also extended out to working with some communities in Congo now who still hunt with

spears in the present day, not spears like this, but they hunt with iron tip spears. And they've done some throwing experiments for us as well. So I think that experimental archaeology, it's a way of understanding the possibility of these technologies rather than giving us a definite answer of what humans were doing in the past. And it's exciting that we're going to be learning therefore more about these spears in the future, not just from experimental archaeology, but hopefully from future archaeological discoveries too. I hope so. I mean, I think it would be amazing to find another Shining Inn, right? Like, especially if it could be a hunting site, just like Shining Inn, but in a different time period or a different context. Yeah, I mean, we're always hoping for sites like that. It is really special. You know, they're just really these high resolution sites. They're rare,

but they tell us so much more about human behavior than the sites where we only have the stone preservation. Absolutely. Shown you in the Holy Grail. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Yeah, it is. Ten spears. That's incredible. Anamika, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on History Hit today.

Thank you so much for having me and talking everything about wooden spears. Thank you so much for having me and talking everything about wooden spears. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Anamika Milks talking all about these first known spears in the archaeological record, these very early wooden spears going from sites such as Clacton to Schöningen. I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I did recording it in person with Anamika. Now, last things from me, you know what I'm going to say, but if you have been enjoying the Ancients podcast recently and it's wonderful to see your feedback, you can help us out on our mission to share these amazing

stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible by leaving us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.