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.
Neanderthal and Early Man Ancestors
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,” according to the paper. This is key, because the collection of wooden hunting tools meshes with other artifacts to tell a more complex story.
Ancient Weapons and Organized Hunting
Along with the wooden weapons, the site held over 1,500 flint tools and the butchered remains of over 50 horses. That collection of clues essentially provides “unequivocal evidence” that Neanderthals repeatedly used the site as “an ambush hunting ground at which entire horse family groups were targeted, killed, and butchered.”
This matches other sites in other locations from the same period. Getting the timing right for this site is important because it presents one of the most complete pictures of social organization and planning.
“Nowhere else in the Middle Pleistocene record are such hunting encounters so well preserved in undisturbed contexts,” according to the paper. “Accordingly, the site has come to serve as a marker horizon in the development of premodern human hunting abilities.”
Read More: Ancient Predators: A Guide to the Neanderthal Hunt
Organized Communities
When archeologists first discovered the wooden spears in the 1990s, they based their age on the sedimentary layers above and below them. The revision relies on the age of snail shells the spears were buried among. Determining the age of amino acids from formerly living things tends to be more precise than chemically measuring the last time the surrounding sediment absorbed sunlight.
The revised age makes the site more consistent with other known neanderthal findings. Other research has placed small bands of those early humans throughout Europe and Central Asia during the Middle Paleolithic. During that time, neanderthals created tools and showed signs of organized hunting tactics.
The Lower Saxony site represents a prime example of such approaches. Archeologists suspect that Neanderthals there banded together to herd the wild horses toward the edge of a lake, where they could easily kill them. The way they were butchered also implies community organization.
Read More: What Types of Tools Did Neanderthals Use and Develop?
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Science Advances. Revised age for Schöningen hunting spears indicates intensification of Neanderthal cooperative behavior around 200,000 years ago
Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.
