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Radiocarbon dating has confirmed that three wooden spears found in a coal mine in Schöningen, near Hannover, Germany, are the oldest complete hunting weapons ever found. Some 380,000 to 400,000 years old, the six- to 7.5-foot javelins were found in soil whose acids had been neutralized by a high concentration of chalk near the coal pit.
Thousands of pieces of horse, elephant, and deer bone were also found at Schöningen. The bones showed cut marks from stone flints found with grooved wooden tools that probably held the flints. If Thieme can prove the flints were hafted in the wooden tools, they will be the oldest known composite tools in the world.
The Clacton lance tip suggested that people may have been hunting; the three spears from Schöningen now make it fairly certain that they were not merely scavenger-gatherers. That early man hunted big game is supported by the recent discovery of a fossilized rhinoceros shoulder blade with a projectile wound at Boxgrove, England, dated to 500,000 years ago.
The three spears, each carved from the trunk of a spruce tree, are 6 feet to more than 7 feet long. They were found with more than 10,000 animal bones, mostly from horses, including many obviously butchered.
That indicates the ancient hunters were organized enough to trap horses and strong enough to kill them by throwing spears, perhaps ambushing herds that showed up for water.
``There's no question if you are hunting a group of horses coming along a lake, you must be strong. You have to plan it. You have to organize it,'' said archeologist Hartmut Thieme, whose crew made the discovery.
The spears, found as researchers worked one step ahead of an expanding coal mine, skewer the idea that humans at that time depended on scavenging and foraging, experts said.
the artifacts are clearly 400,000 years old, based on the well-known age of the 10-meter-deep geological layer in which they were uncovered. The spears were unearthed along with notched wooden implements that presumably held stone blades, sundry stone tools, the remains of a fire and thousands of horse bones (some showing evidence of butchery).
At that time, Thieme says, the site was on the shore of a flat lake in a cool, open landscape of meadows and steppes.
Originally posted by RRokkyy
If you were alive then that is who you would have been.
Imagine millions of years evolving from a small chimpanzee like ape,to
a javelin throwing creature, living with sabre toothed tigers and woolly mammoths.
What do you think about that?
Originally posted by oozyism
reply to post by BeastMaster2012
for 400,000 years we haven't change, people in Africa still do this kind of activity, with similar equipments, don't they?
So what's to say humans have changed at all? The Technological changes could get destroyed in a matter of seconds?
Originally posted by BeastMaster2012
i would guess if you are making tools to hunt big game, you have to have a great deal of intelligence. I wonder what kind of places they would live in. I wonder when the first human/ape started to build homes..
Originally posted by JustJoe
Old Zacharia Sitchin and Graham Hancock must be doing cart-wheels right about now!!! Good find, I love when people find stuff that totally flies in the face of the reality others are trying so desperately to push on us...Ii find that if you choose to believe in what FEELS right deep inside you will find yourself, more often then not, on the right side of most arguments.
Just Joe