Oldest Spear Points Date to 500,000 Years

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This is important.  The thrownstone is common to primates and an obvious tool for killing game.  The fire hardened sharpened stick isimmediately available once our ancestors began using fire long before this.  The real step up into tool manufacturingbegins with attaching a sharp stone to a strong stick and would certainly coincidewith sharp stone cutting tools.  If youcan do one, the other is obvious and natural.

 

Thus we have taken the introduction of this protocol back to the timethat Mankind and Neanderthals diverged. It was developed once and never a case of one learning from the other.

 

When I started tracking this closely a decade ago, it was obvious tomyself that most accepted dates were grossly recent making them terriblymisleading.  This was largely an artifactof distribution maturation in which the majority of artifacts are concentratedin the time period in which maximum distribution is achieved.  That can easily be millennia after firstdiscovery and often is.

 

Since then I have watched date after date be rolled back.

 

Oldestspear points date to 500,000 years

http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.ca/2012/11/oldest-spear-points-date-to-500000-years.html
Acollaborative study involving researchers at Arizona State University, theUniversity of Toronto, and the University of Cape Town found that humanancestors were making stone-tipped weapons 500,000 years ago at the SouthAfrican archaeological site of Kathu Pan 1 -- 200,000 years earlier thanpreviously thought. This study, "Evidence for Early Hafted HuntingTechnology," is published in the November 16 issue of the journal Science.



### This is a~500,000-year-old point from Kathu Pan 1. Multiple lines of evidence from aUniversity of Toronto-led study indicate that points from Kathu Pan 1 were usedas hafted spear tips. Scale bar = 1 cm [Credit: Jayne Wilkins]

Attachingstone points to spears (known as "hafting") was an important advancein hunting weaponry for early humans. Hafted tools require more effort andforeplanning to manufacture, but a sharp stone point on the end of a spear canincrease its killing power.

"There is a reason that modern bow-hunterstip their arrows with razor-sharp edges. These cutting tips are extremelylethal when compared to the effects from a sharpened stick. Early humanslearned this fact earlier than previously thought," said Benjamin Schoville,a coauthor of this study and doctoral student affiliated with the Institute ofHuman Origins, a research center of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences atArizona State University.

Hafted spear tips are common in Stone Agearchaeological sites after 300,000 years ago. This study shows that hafted spear tips were alsoused in the early Middle Pleistocene, a period associated with Homoheidelbergensis, the last common ancestor of Neandertals and modern humans.

"Rather than being invented twice, or by onegroup learning from the other, stone-tipped spear technology was in place muchearlier," said Schoville. "Although both Neandertals and humans usedstone-tipped spears, this is the first evidence that this technologyoriginated prior to or near the divergence of these two species."

"It now looks like some of the traits thatwe associate with modern humans and our nearest relatives can be traced furtherback in our lineage," said Jayne Wilkins, lead author from the University of Toronto. "This changes the way wethink about early human adaptations and capacities before the origin of our ownspecies."


### Examples ofexperimental hafted points. Points were hafted to wooden dowels using Acaciaresin and sinew and then thrust into a springbok carcass target using acalibrated crossbow. The Kathu Pan 1 archaeological points show a similarpattern of edge damage to these experimental points [Credit: Jayne Wilkins]

Pointfunction was determined by comparing wear on the ancient points to damageinflicted on modern experimental points used to spear a springbok carcasstarget with a calibrated crossbow. This method has been used effectively tostudy weaponry from more recent contexts in the Middle East and southern Africa.

"When points are used as spear tips, thereis a lot of damage that forms at the tip of the point, and large distinctivefractures form. The damage on these ancient stone spear points is remarkablysimilar to those produced with our calibrated crossbow experiment, and wedemonstrate they are not easily created from other processes," saidcoauthor Kyle Brown, a skilled stone tool replicator with the University ofCape Town.

The points were recovered during 1979-1982excavations by Peter Beaumont of the McGregorMuseum, Kimberly, South Africa.

In 2010, a team directed by coauthor MichaelChazan from the University of Toronto reported that the point-bearing depositsat KP1 dated to around 500,000 years ago using optically stimulatedluminescence and U-series/electron spin resonance methods. The dating analyseswere carried out by Naomi Porat, Geological Survey of Israel, and Rainer Grün, Australian National University.

Funding for this research was provided by theSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National ScienceFoundation, and the Hyde Family Foundation, and with important logisticalsupport from the South African Heritage Resources Agency and the McGregorMuseum.

The Instituteof Human Origins is the leadingresearch organization in the United States devoted to the science of humanorigins. Embedded within ASU's School of Human Evolution andSocial Change, the institute pursues a transdisciplinary strategy for field andanalytical paleoanthropological research central to its 30-year-old foundingmission -- integrating social, earth, and life science approaches to the mostimportant questions concerning the course, timing, and causes of humanevolutionary change over deep time. The institute links to its researchactivities innovative public outreach programs that create timely, accurateinformation for education and lay communities.