German mine yields ancient hunting spears

Excavations in the depths of a German coal mine have bagged the archaeological equivalent of really big game -- the world's oldest known hunting weapons, a trio of wooden spears fashioned with admirable skill by apparently dedicated meat eaters as many as 400,000 years ago.

 Investigators led by Hartmut Thieme of the Institute for the Preservation of Historical Monuments in Hannover, Germany, found the spears -- which range in length from 6 to 7 feet -- lying among stone implements and animal bones, including the butchered remains of more than 10 horses.

"This offers strong reason to suspect that the spears were used for hunting rather than simply driving predators away from carcasses," Thieme holds. His description of the discoveries appears in the Feb. 27 Nature.

 Thieme initiated archaeological work at the Schoningen mine in 1983. Extensive coal mining there had revealed soil layers bearing artifacts of great antiquity. The researchers were unprepared, though, for encountering well-preserved hunting weapons.

 Many theorists had maintained that big-game hunting emerged about 100,000 years ago, at most. The only specimens comparable to the Schoningen material are a 125,000-year-old wooden shaft found inside an elephant skeleton at another German site in 1948 and a 400,000-year-old stone tip -- perhaps part of a spear -- unearthed in England in 1911.

 Some scientists interpreted these discoveries as either digging sticks or probes for locating snow-covered carcasses.

"But the Schoningen discoveries are unambiguously spears," writes archaeologist Robin Dennell of the University of Sheffield in England in an accompanying comment. "To regard them as snow-probes or digging sticks is like claiming that power drills are paperweights."

 Spear making required careful planning, Thieme notes. Each weapon consists of the trunk of a 30-year-old spruce tree with the bark removed. Tips were sharpened at the base of the trunk, where the wood is hardest. The thickest and heaviest part of the carved shaft is about one-third of the distance from the spear point, as in a modern javelin.

 These spears were made for throwing at animals from a distance, not for thrusting into their bodies at close range, according to Thieme.

 Of the animal bones at the site, most of them from horses, many have incisions and fractures typically produced during butchery, the German archaeologist says. The material probably dates to 400,000 years ago, based on its position in a soil layer sandwiched between deposits of previously identified ice ages, he adds.

 Human ancestors may have weathered northern Europe's frigid climate as many as 500,000 years ago, thanks to their hunting proficiency, Dennell suggests. England's Boxgrove quarry contains butchered animal remains from that time.

"I wouldn't be surprised to find spears at Boxgrove like those at Schoningen," remarks Mark B. Roberts of University College, London, who directs the Boxgrove project. "Still, I'm amazed at the advanced technology displayed in the German weapons."

 In the absence of age estimates from any absolute dating techniques, Roberts says that the new finds may be only 350,000 years old.

 No human or humanlike fossils have been found at Schoningen, leaving unclear the identity of the spear makers. Thieme regards them as Homo erectus, Roberts tentatively assigns them to an early version of H. sapiens, and Christopher B. Stringer of the British Museum in London thinks they may have been predecessors of Neandertals.