400,000 year old spears found in an German coal mine!

reinep.wordpress.com ^ | 07-04-2010 | Staff

[Red Badger]

Researchers in Germany have unearthed 400,000 year old wooden spears from what appears to be an ancient lake shore hunting ground stunning evidence that human ancestors systematically hunted big game much earlier than believed. The three spears, each carved from the trunk of a spruce tree, are 6 feet to more than 7 feet long. They were found with more than 10,000 animal bones, mostly from horses, including many obviously butchered. That indicates the ancient hunters were organized enough to trap horses and strong enough to kill them by throwing spears, perhaps ambushing herds that showed up for water.

“There’s no question if you are hunting a group of horses coming along a lake, you must be strong. You have to plan it. You have to organize it,” said archeologist Hartmut Thieme, whose crew made the discovery. The spears, found as researchers worked one step ahead of an expanding coal mine, skewer the idea that humans at that time depended on scavenging and foraging, experts said. “What it’s telling us is these people were very sophisticated, competent hunters,” said Robin Dennell, a professor of prehistory at the University of Sheffield in England. “They were perfectly capable of long-term planning and foresight.” And “they must have been awfully strong, far stronger than I am. Those spears are longer than I am.”

Before the new find, there had been some evidence of systematic hunting about 200,000 years ago. The spears are twice that old. In addition, some researchers have argued that such hunting didn’t truly begin until about 40,000 years ago. Thieme, who works for the state of Lower Saxony in Germany, reported his crew’s discoveries last week in the journal Nature. He and colleagues had found the spears in 1995 near Schoeningen, about 60 miles southeast of Hanover. Since the Nature paper was written, his crew has come across pieces of a fourth spear. The spears were obviously made with care. After chopping down an appropriate tree and stripping off the bark and branches, the ancient hunters carved the tip at the base of the trunk, where the wood is hardest.

The spears were shaped to be thickest toward the front with a long tapering tail, like modern javelins, which suggests they were meant for throwing rather than jabbing. After all that work “they’re not going to throw it at a squirrel in a dark night,” said Dennell, who wrote a Nature commentary on the spears. “These people were serious about hunting.”

Frank Herrold, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Arlington , said the spears will have to be studied further to establish that they were really meant to be thrown. The hunters, called archaic Homo sapiens or Homo heidelbergensis, were distant ancestors of Neanderthals. They hunted in a cool climate like that of central Norway today. They sought game in a landscape of large meadows with spruce and birch trees. A few of their spears were preserved over the eons because they were waterlogged , a rare stroke of luck, noted F. Clark Howell, emeritus professor of paleoanthropology at the University of California at Berkeley

“This finding demonstrates what a few people have guessed at . . . that we’re dealing with a hunting people, that hunting is an important part of their lives,” he said.

Additional info

Radiocarbon dating has confirmed that three wooden spears found in a coal mine in Schöningen, near Hannover, Germany, are the oldest complete hunting weapons ever found. Some 380,000 to 400,000 years old, the six- to 7.5-foot javelins were found in soil whose acids had been neutralized by a high concentration of chalk near the coal pit.

And what about this?

Thousands of pieces of horse, elephant, and deer bone were also found at Schöningen. The bones showed cut marks from stone flints found with grooved wooden tools that probably held the flints. If Thieme can prove the flints were hafted in the wooden tools, they will be the oldest known composite tools in the world.

This is also strange!

The Clacton lance tip suggested that people may have been hunting; the three spears from Schöningen now make it fairly certain that they were not merely scavenger-gatherers. That early man hunted big game is supported by the recent discovery of a fossilized rhinoceros shoulder blade with a projectile wound at Boxgrove, England, dated to 500,000 years ago.

[Rainwave]

To the ‘guy’ that says I’m full of sh*t, First off, if they weren’t carbon dated, how did they know how old these spears were? Because they may have been imbeded in coal? Does anyone remember the incident where coal miners broke into an air pocket in the coal and there was a frog hibernating inside that slowly came alive!? Second, If you aren’t A Christian or Jewish person, you won’t understand the concept of the ‘canopy’ of water and mist surrounding the earth before the great flood (the great flood was written about by almost all civilizations living at the time), thus keeping the sun’s more harmfull rays from man, allowing him to live to great ages. It also preserved a delicate balance of things we will never know about. When the flood came (canopy dropped and the oceans within the earth were released) It threw ‘carbon’ dating out the window. The instant bombardment to the earth of these harmfull rays affected mankind by greatly reducing their life expectancy, the rays also radiated and fried the earth’s fauna and substances of every kind as to render any type of carbon dating unreliable. AFTER the flood carbon dating became spot on and reliable. I may not be totally correct about all of this and laugh if you want, but that’s where faith comes in. We will find out who was more accurate about these events when we get to heaven.

[SunkenCiv]

I said you didn't know what you were talking about, not that you're full of ****. You still don't.

The limit on radiocarbon dating is about 45,000 years. There are ample resources online about this, plus this has been mentioned in each topic where someone who doesn't understand this had it explained to them. There's no excuse for not knowing about it, particularly for not knowing before you troll in a science topic. There are other radiometric methods of dating, and each one has a different range of age that it works within, thanks to radioactive half-lives.

No one remembers the incident with the live frog was found in coal, because it never happened. It has however often shown up, with a wide variety of different locations and details. It is a tall tale, nothing more.

The OT records The Deluge. Cultures all over the world had tales of local flood events from various widely spaced times, and all of them different. Citing one of those, or all of them, merely undermines the OT version, it doesn't strengthen it.

There was no canopy of water. "The Waters Above" came out, hmm, perhaps 30 years ago, and exceeded the length of the work that originated the notion of the water canopy. It was being sold via a fringe magazine of some sort that I used to get in the mail. But neither book nor the many derivative scribblings on the water canopy has made the idea feasible or even plausible, even if there were evidence that it had ever existed (there isn't any). Carbon dating works on artifacts that have been submerged in the ocean for thousands of years -- so no canopy of water falling down is going to have direct or indirect impact on the accuracy of carbon dating.

[Pharmboy]

That’s Europe. No Cro-Magnons in Africa or Asia.