TECHNOLOGY × SUBSISTENCE

The Oldest Hunting Spears

~300,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · MIS 8

Beside an ancient lakeshore at Schöningen, Germany, waterlogged sediment preserved what almost never survives: wood. The full inventory counts 187 worked wooden objects, among them at least 20 hunting weapons, long spears and shorter double-pointed throwing sticks, made with techniques that included splitting. One throwing stick, carved from a spruce branch, was debarked, seasoned against cracking and shaped to fly, able to strike prey up to thirty metres away.

Why it matters

Stone survives everywhere and wood almost nowhere, so Schöningen is our clearest window onto what most Paleolithic technology probably was. These are not sharpened branches but engineered weapons, implying planning, skill and coordinated hunts. And they belong not to Homo sapiens but to earlier Europeans, the ancestors and relatives of Neanderthals.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

The spears are wood and cannot be dated directly by the usual clocks; their age comes from the deposits around them. First estimates put the site near 400,000 years, later revised to about 300,000. In 2025, amino acid dating of fossils from the find layer argued for roughly 200,000 years, which would place the spears in the hands of Neanderthals during a shift toward communal hunting. The debate is open.

Sources

1. Leder et al. (2024), PNAS · The wooden artifacts from Schöningen's Spear Horizon and their place in human evolutiondoi:10.1073/pnas.2320484121
2. Milks et al. (2023), PLOS ONE · A double-pointed wooden throwing stick from Schöningen, Germany: results and new insights from a multianalytical studydoi:10.1371/journal.pone.0287719
3. Hutson et al. (2025), Science Advances · Revised age for Schöningen hunting spears indicates intensification of Neanderthal cooperative behavior around 200,000 years agodoi:10.1126/sciadv.adv0752

Our species’ history as one day

01:08:3422 h 51 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day