In 1836, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, a Danish archaeologist, brought the first semblance of order to prehistory, suggesting that the first hominids of Europe had passed through three stages of technological development that were reflected in the production of tools. The basic chronology – 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 Wood Age with the Stone Age, according to Thomas Terberger, archaeologist and head of research at the Department of Cultural Heritage in Lower Saxony, Germany.
“We can probably assume that wooden tools have been around as long as stone tools, two and a half or three million years,” he said. “But because wood decays and rarely survives, preservation bias distorts our view of antiquity.” Primitive stone tools traditionally characterize 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 the era, wood has been recovered from fewer than 10.
Dr. Terberger led the group of a study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provided the first comprehensive report on the wooden objects excavated from 1994 to 2008 in the peat of an open pit coal mine near Schöningen, northern Germany. The rich haul included two dozen complete or fragmentary spears (each about the height of an NBA center) and double-pointed throwing sticks (half the length of a mouse) but no humanoid bones. The artifacts date to the end of a warm interglacial period 300,000 years ago, around the time early Neanderthals replaced Homo heidelbergensis, their immediate predecessors in Europe. The projectiles discovered at the Schöningen site, known as the Spear Horizon, are considered to be the oldest surviving hunting weapons.
In the mid-1990s, the discovery of three of the spears – along with stone tools and the butchered remains of 10 wild horses – overturned prevailing ideas about the intelligence, social interaction and tool-making skills of our extinct human ancestors. At the time, the scientific consensus was that humans were simple scavengers living hand to mouth until about 40,000 years ago.
“It turned out that these pre-Homo sapiens had made tools and weapons to hunt large game,” Dr Terberger said. “Not only did they communicate together to subvert prey, but they were sophisticated enough to organize the slaughter and roasting.”
The new study, which began in 2021, examined more than 700 pieces of wood from the Spear Horizon, many of which had spent the previous two decades stored in frozen tubs of distilled water to simulate the sediment-soaked sediment that had protected them from decomposition. Using 3D microscopy and micro-CT scans that showed signs of wear or cutting, the researchers identified 187 pieces of wood that showed signs of splitting, scraping or abrasion.
“Until now it was thought that splitting wood was only done by modern humans,” said Dirk Leder, an archaeologist also in Lower Saxony and lead author of the paper.
In addition to the weapons, the assemblage included 35 pointed and rounded objects likely used in domestic activities such as hole punching and leather grinding. All were carved from spruce, pine or pine – “woods that are both hard and flexible,” said Annemieke Milks, an anthropologist from the University of Reading who collaborated on the project.
Since neither fir nor pine would be available on the lake shore where the site was located, the research team concluded that the trees had been cut on a mountain two or three miles away, or perhaps further. Close inspection of the spears showed that the Stone Agers carefully planned their woodworking projects, following a set sequence: strip the bark, remove the branches, sharpen the spearhead, harden the wood in the fire. “The wooden tools had a higher level of technological sophistication than we usually see in stone tools from that time,” Dr Leder said.
Francesco d’Errico, an archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux who was not involved in the study, praised his knowledge of the methods and materials Stone Age people used to solve practical Stone Age problems. “The paper opens a window into the almost unknown world of the Lower Paleolithic,” he said. “Despite the lack of data, the authors make a valiant attempt to propose a scenario for the evolution of such technology that must be tested in the future against new discoveries.”
Perhaps the most surprising revelation is that some of the spear points were resharpened after earlier breaking or blunting, and that some of the broken weapons had been dulled, polished and reused. “The wood we identified as work debris suggests that the tools were repaired and recycled into new tools for other tasks,” Dr Milks said.
All but one of the spears were carved from the trunks of slow-growing fir trees and shaped and balanced like modern javelins, with the center of gravity in the middle of the trunk. But were they meant to be thrown or pushed? “The spears were made of dense wood and of thick diameters,” Dr. Milks said. “To me, this suggests that the hominids making them may have deliberately designed at least some as flying weapons for hunting.”
He tested the external ballistics of the javelins by recruiting six trained male javelin throwers, aged 18 to 34, to lift replicas into hay bales from various distances. “My goal was to ask people who were a little bit better at doing this than archaeologists, because up until that point, we’d had experiments with a lot of people who were … archaeologists,” Dr Milks said, adding: “Anthropologists aren’t very good at that sort of thing.”
From 33 feet away, the Neanderthal team hit the target 25 percent of the time. Athletes were equally accurate at 50 feet and only slightly less so (17 percent) at 65 feet. “However, this was twice the range at which scientists had estimated that a hand-thrown spear could be useful for hunting,” Dr Milks said.
For her, the notion that our Stone Age ancestors were craftsmen serves to humanize them. “Woodworking is slow, even if you’re good at it,” he said. “There are many different steps in the process.” He imagines a bunch of Neanderthals gathered around an afternoon campfire, assembling and sanding and repairing their wooden crafts. “It all seems so, so close, somehow,” he said wistfully, “even though it was so long ago.”