The Schöningen spears: the oldest wooden hunting weapons
- Date
- c. 300,000 years ago
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Central Europe (Germany)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
Excavations at an open-cast lignite mine at Schöningen in Lower Saxony, Germany, recovered a set of carefully crafted wooden throwing spears, along with throwing sticks and the butchered remains of dozens of horses, in waterlogged lake-shore sediments that preserved the organic material.
The spears — shaped from spruce and pine, balanced like modern javelins — are the oldest complete wooden hunting weapons known and provide direct evidence that Middle Pleistocene humans were skilled, cooperative big-game hunters rather than mere scavengers. Long dated to roughly 300,000–400,000 years ago and attributed to Homo heidelbergensis, the site was re-dated in 2025 using amino-acid analysis of snail shells to around 200,000 years, which would place it in the early Neanderthal period of the Middle Palaeolithic. Either way, Schöningen reveals sophisticated woodworking, planning, and the coordinated group hunting of large, dangerous animals — a striking demonstration of the cognitive and social capabilities of pre-modern humans, and a rare glimpse of the perishable technology that usually leaves no archaeological trace.
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Further reading
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