In 1836, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, a Danish antiquarian, brought the first semblance of order to prehistory, suggesting that the early hominids of Europe had gone through three stages of technological development manifested in tool production. The basic chronology – from Stone Age to Bronze Age to Iron Age – now underpins the archeology of most of the Old World (and cartoons like ‘The Flintstones’ and ‘The Croods’).
Thomsen could well have replaced the Stone Age with the Stone Age, according to Thomas Terberger, archaeologist and head of research at the Cultural Heritage Department of Lower Saxony, in Germany.
“We can probably assume that wooden tools have existed for as long as stones, that is, 2.5 to 3 million years,” he said. “But as wood deteriorates and rarely survives, the preference for preservation distorts our view of antiquity.” Primitive stone tools have traditionally characterized the Lower Paleolithic period, which lasted from about 2.7 million years ago to 200,000 years ago. Of the thousands of archaeological sites that can be traced back to that time, wood has been recovered from less than ten.
Terberger was team leader of a study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that provided the first comprehensive report on the wooden objects excavated between 1994 and 2008 from the peat of an open-pit coal mine near Schöningen, in North Germany. . The rich loot included twenty complete or fragmented spears (each about the size of an NBA center) and double-pointed throwing sticks (half the length of a pool cue), but no humanoid bones. The objects date from the end of a warm interglacial period, 300,000 years ago, when early Neanderthals displaced Homo heidelbergensis, their immediate predecessors in Europe. The projectiles excavated at the Schöningen site, known as Spear Horizon, are considered the oldest preserved hunting weapons.
In the mid-1990s, the discovery of three of the spears – along with stone tools and the butchered remains of ten wild horses – upended prevailing ideas about the intelligence, social interaction and skills of our extinct human ancestors. At the time, the scientific consensus was that humans were simple scavengers who lived from hand to mouth until about 40,000 years ago.
“It turned out that these pre-Homo sapiens had created tools and weapons to hunt big game,” Terberger said. “Not only did they communicate together to knock down prey, but they were also sophisticated enough to organize butchering and roasting.”
The new study, which began in 2021, examined more than 700 pieces of wood from Spear Horizon, many of which had been stored for the past two decades in refrigerated vats of distilled water to simulate the waterlogged sediment that had protected them from decay. Using 3D microscopy and micro-CT scanners to detect signs of wear or cut marks, researchers identified 187 pieces of wood that showed signs of splitting, scraping or abrasion.
“Until now, it was thought that splitting wood was only practiced by modern humans,” says Dirk Leder, an archaeologist from Lower Saxony and lead author of the paper.
In addition to weapons, the collection included 35 pointed and round artifacts that were most likely used in household activities such as punching holes and smoothing hides. They were all carved from spruce, pine or larch wood – “wood that is both hard and flexible,” says Annemieke Milks, an anthropologist from the University of Reading who worked on the project.
Because neither spruce nor pine would have been available on the lakeshore where the site was located, the research team concluded that the trees had been felled on a mountain 2 to 3 miles away or perhaps even further. Close inspection of the spears indicated that the Stone Ages had carefully planned their woodworking projects, following a fixed sequence: stripping the bark, removing the branches, sharpening the spear point, hardening the wood in fire. “The wooden tools had a higher level of technological complexity than we usually see in stone tools of that era,” Leder said.
All but one of the spears were hewn from the trunks of slow-growing spruce trees and shaped and balanced like modern spears, with the center of gravity in the center of the shaft. But were they intended for throwing or knocking? “The spears were made of dense wood and had a thick diameter,” Milks said. “To me, this suggests that the humanoids who manufacture them deliberately designed at least some of them as escape weapons for hunting.”
She tested the external ballistics of the javelins by enlisting six trained male javelin throwers, aged between 18 and 34, to hoist replicas from different distances into hay bales. “My point was to ask people who were a little better at this than archaeologists, because up until that point we had had experiments with a lot of people who were… archaeologists,” Milks said, adding: “Anthropologists are not very good at those kind of things.”
From 10 meters away, Team Neanderthals hit the target 25% of the time. The athletes were equally accurate at 15 meters, and only slightly less (17%) at 20 meters. “Still, that was double the distance at which scientists had estimated a hand-thrown spear would be useful for hunting,” Milks said.
For her, the idea that our Stone Age ancestors were craftsmen helps humanize it. “Woodworking is slow, even if you’re good at it,” she said. “There are many different steps in the process.” She imagines a bunch of Neanderthals gathered around a campfire at night, assembling, sanding and repairing their wooden crafts. “It all seems very, very close in a way,” she said wistfully, “even though it was so long, very long ago.”