Ancient snail shells helped archeologists re-evaluate the age of the oldest known wooden weapons collection: a site in Lower Saxony, Germany, famous for its arsenal of hunting equipment, including nine spears, one lance, and six double-pointed sticks.
Researchers now say the weapons date back closer to 200,000 years, rather than the 300,000 years to 400,000 years of earlier estimates, according to an article in Science Advances.
This has important implications to our understanding of early man. The previous estimations did not mesh well with the human developmental timeline.
The article called the earlier age attributed to the wooden weapons an “outlier,” because, if correct, it would show that Homo heidelbergensis, likely the last common ancestor of both early modern humans and Neanderthals, possessed both the tools and techniques necessary for organized hunting. There has been little if any evidence of this anywhere else.
“Our dating evidence […] corrects this mismatch,” ...
