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Neanderthals Were Likely Able To Hunt Over Significant Distances With Spears, Study Finds (nature.com)
dryriver writes: In the past, Neanderthal humans were believed to be largely close-distance hunters. A new paper in the journal Nature, based on actual outdoor tests with multiple test subjects throwing two wooden spears closely mimicking ancient spears found in various places at a target, surmises that spear throwing Neanderthals may in fact have been able to kill animals at distances of 60 feet or even greater. The authors found that targeting a wooden spear accurately at that distance takes skill, and even worked out the impact velocity of Neanderthal spears at such a distance. Nevertheless, Neanderthals with sufficient practice in spear throwing may very well have been capable of killing at distances far greater than previously thought. This changes the assumption that Neanderthals needed to get very close to animals in order to have a chance of killing them.
The fact that we interbred with them means they were the same species as us whatever others may say, just a different race who happened to be somewhat stronger and just as intelligent.
The more we learn about Neanderthals, the less inferior they seem compared to other hominids.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Proposals that features of the upper limbs of different species of Homo indicate that throwing only comes into play with H. sapiens are hampered by multiple issues. These include small sample sizes, human variation in populations, evidence that humeral robusticity and shape may not correlate with strains in weapon use, and a lack of clarity whether any single activity contributes to or offsets bone remodeling or robusticity. Others argue for an earlier emergence of throwing, showing that features necessary for accurate and powerful throwing are evidenced in H. erectus fossils. A recent find of an early Neanderthal dating to MIS 7 from Tourville-la-Rivière shows skeletal trauma consistent with repeated throwing, supporting the hypothesis that they were capable and frequent throwers.
I'm curious what the result of the debate will be.
I can attest to this. In high school, we got a couple of lessons in throwing javelins. The protocol was not well established, because a girl threw a javelin when someone else went to pick up theirs. Although the javelins were blunted, it got stuck in the calve muscles of their left leg. The wound was cleaned and the "victim" appeared in class again after a couple of days. This was over a distance of, say, ten meters (32 feet).
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In the past, Neanderthal humans were believed to be largely close-distance hunters. A new paper in the journal Nature, based on actual outdoor tests with multiple test subjects throwing two wooden spears closely mimicking ancient spears found in various places at a target, surmises that spear throwing Neanderthals may in fact have been able to kill animals at distances of 60 feet or even greater. The authors found that targeting a wooden spear accurately at that distance takes skill, and even worked out the impact velocity of Neanderthal spears at such a distance. Nevertheless, Neanderthals with sufficient practice in spear throwing may very well have been capable of killing at distances far greater than previously thought. This changes the assumption that Neanderthals needed to get very close to animals in order to have a chance of killing them.
I've always wondered where this myth came from that Neanderthals were unable to throw their spears any significant distance and needed to get up close and personal to get a kill. There was even this crazy hypothesis for a while that Neanderthals simply couldn't throw spears because of the structure of their shoulder bones. During tests with the Schöningens spears that German archaeologists conducted 20 years ago they found that modern athletes could throw replicas of the Schöningen spears up to 70 meters. A skilled spear man can hit something the size of the heart/lung area of a deer for example at a third and up to half that range. Modern day javelin throwers can hit a coconut at 20 meters, I'd expect palaeolithic hunters to be far more skilled. The Shöningen spears are over 300.000 years old and were already quite cleverly optimised for throwing and would have been made by proto-Neanderthals. The Schöningen find pretty much destroyed the idea that humans were basically carrion eaters until very recently in their history and only used spears along with fire to chase predators off their kills. They probably did that as well but they mostly seem to have been active hunters from very early on. Nevertheless there are still people sticking to the carrion eater theory.
I wonder why this study is considered big news now. It confirms the findings of German scientists from the late 90s (see e.g. Die Recken von Schöningen – 400 000 Jahre Jagd mit dem Speer, more publications referenced in the German Wikipedia and the new article in Nature). The design of the experiments seems similar. They even chose the very same spear (Schöningen 2) to base their replicas on.
Replicating earlier results is important and useful. Still I don't get why the results are reported by the media as if they were a surprise.
As the 1999 article Die Recken von Schöningen – 400 000 Jahre Jagd mit dem Speer discusses, throwing spears matters, animals will flee at a certain distance of a perceived threat. For most animals this is less than 30 m. The Schöningen spears make practical hunting weapons up to about 30 m distance.
The 1999 article also argues that in some situations throwing spears is more effective than using a bow: Animals learn to associate the characteristic noise from firing an arrow from a bow with danger; triggering a flight reflex that makes them start to move while the arrow is still in flight. This can be a problem when hunting with bows. On the other hand, there is no such noise when throwing spears