Dr Milks is an eloquent and knowledgeable speaker and obviously passionate about her work. It was a pleasure to listen to her explain the past.

One of the fascinating things about the Schöningen spears is what they tell us about how well the makers understood the material properties of the wood they used. The base of a tree/sapling is stronger, more dense wood and more resistant to damage as a result. These spears were made specifically to take advantage of this, with the proximal or striking point made from the base of the sapling, and the distal end the lighter, more flexible wood, which helps in flight and in avoiding shaft breakage upon impact. This indicates that they understood the material properties of the wood very well, and made these spears specifically maximize their effectiveness in light of the material properties.

The sort of trees need to make wooden spears is fairly common worldwide, while the kind of stone needed to make durable points is somewhat rare and also more difficult to find. This alone suggests that wooden spears would remain in use after stone working becomes available.

Hawaiians were using wood tipped, barbed, spears for combat up until the early 1800's. The weight of the spear with its momentum make it deadly, even with a blunt tip. We throw them during makahiki games, and a proficient person can throw many yards accurately as well as catch spears thrown at them (seriously, look it up).

I've seen a video of a young man in the Balkans, wearing traditional clothing, spear a boar with a wooden spear. His dogs were worrying the boar and the boar ran straight at him. He simply braced his spear against the ground and held it pointing towards the running boar. The boar ran into the spear, impaling himself. It's like the boar did not recognize the spear as being dangerous. The boar was focused on attacking the man. The spear impaled the boar all the way through and the man picked the boar up and threw the boar down so the boar was on his back. The boar was still alive and squealing loudly. The young man drew a large knife from his belt and stabbed the boar in the neck and the boar soon died. It was an impressive sight. The man seemed to be very experienced with spear hunting boar.

Never seen this channel in my feed before. Not even three minutes in and I’m subscribed. Immediately into knowledgeable and qualified person giving a very thorough explanations and descriptions. Love it

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein

Makes sense that they’d still use just wood spears, even once they started making flint or rock tipped spears. The wooden spears are easier to make and would work just fine for quite a few things, could save the harder to make flint or rock tipped spear for when they’d really need it then. You wouldn’t want to damage your good spear or lose the rock tip, when you can use an easier to make wooden spear instead. 🤷‍♀️

The best presenter ever. Every syllable clearly understandable. She should be a news reader.

Can we please have a video on all the testing they did? That looks fascinating

In case anyone hadn't realised it, Clacton-on-Sea would not have been 'on-sea' 400,000 years ago, but in the middle of a continuous land mass from what is now the British Isles across to the Central European Plain. Doggerland no longer exists as the North Sea drowned it relatively recently.

11:38 "Why they left them behind [the spears at Schöningen]" seems pretty obvious to me. She mentioned that the area was a lake shore, which is where big game come to drink. Hunters likely ambushed game at the shoreline, and the spears that missed their prey simply torpedoed into the water and buried themselves in the silt/clay.

We play with their skulls. But these were living creatures who loved, who hated, who mated, raised children, had lives of happiness and sorrow, danger and peace. I think it's important to remember that.

Really good! I for one would be interested in a film on the experimental use of these tools. Nice one team! 🌟👍

The most successful hunting tool is not so much the spear itself, it’s group tactics. The plan was not just to sneak up on the beast and then throw spears, it was to position hunters where the beast was likely to run when surprised by the women & children who scare the beast in the intended direction (into the waiting spear chucking range and spear jabbing range.

It occurs to me that if you throw a spear like this at an elephant (from a short distance, these are heavy) it won't go in very far, but if the elephant charges you with one end of the spear penetrating just enough to stay put, and the other (also sharp) end of the spear on the ground, the elephant will do the work for you and impale itself. This might mean that hunting large, aggressive animals is actually easier than hunting smaller, less aggressive animals.

I was born in Essex and I've been to Clacton. Not entirely suprised one of the earliest weapons was found there to be honest.

Very in depth, thank you! These quality videos simply cannot be replicated by A.l. Bravo

Really enjoyed this video, so thoughtful and exciting at the same time. Thank you to all concerned, especially Dr. Milks.

That was so interesting I’m amazed those spears were 400 thousand years old

Just saw a throwing demonstration with replicas of the Schöningen Spears, the modern athletes noted how alike they are to the Olympic Javelins.

The phenomenon that different levels of technology exist next to each other (like the fully wooden spears and the stone-tipped spears they talk about around minute 20) is also known from other time periods. For example, the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle has a bronze arrow tip and a stone arrow tip, both from the Bronze Age. The tips are of the same size and shape (very finely made, about the size of a larger fingernail). I assume it has to do with availability of material. If you had access to the better stuff, you could use that, but if you maybe didn't have any of that at the time, you would fall back onto the earlier technology and make do with that. Or maybe if you can do with the easier/cheaper method, you will not undertake the effort of using the more costly version. A wooden spear is made more quickly than a stone-tipped spear, so it's "cheaper" in time. And bronze was expensive, so a stone arrow tip was cheaper than a bronze one.

They obviously must travel in groups and the lake was a seasonal habitat. The spears may have been left behind at the site because they had made more than they used and decided to leave them for when they return next season. I’m sure the clan members would feel good about knowing the lake site is set up for their return, waiting for them. Probably also some kind of shelter waiting for their return too.

I had no idea as to the size of the spears! They are huge and I suspect the mussels required to throw them effectively was SIGNIFICANT! Incredible video! It’s a good day when I learn something new and today was a very good day!

I have three different examples of hardwood tipped long arrows (1.5m) from Papua New Guinea they look and are scary effective in both hunting and warfare.

It is great to see that that more passionate research is done around this topic, which was first picked up by german researchers around 2000.

dr. annemeike is wonderful i hope you have her again!!

I just listened to this as a podcast yesterday. The editing differences are interesting and make total sense. Just an observation. It’s interesting what different choices are made based on the media form.

the spear was the king of historical weapons for sure

A pointy stick is also good for uses other than poking animals and people. You can use it to dig or carry or drag or stack them together and make a temporary shelter. They don't have to be thrown or thrust; you can plant one end like pikemen receiving a cavalry charge or how Japanese hunters would defend against a bear. It's a useful all round outdoors tool, just as an axe or a knife is.

My goodness. She's awesome. That silky shirt on her is amazing.

I lived 19 years in Schöningen, we have a big museum build around that find called the Palaeon, never knew that those spears are so fucking famous and it makes me somehow proud

Indigenous Australian are still using wooden spears, with fire hardened tips on traditional hunts. Selecting and shaping a sapling has significant meaning. Not surprisingly from one of the world’s longest continuous culture, and worth looking at for greater insight.

I would reckon purely wooden spears persisted after stone-tipped spears were developed because stone-tipped spears are only marginally more effective then purely wooden spears, way more time/effort consuming to make, and more prone to snapping after a single use. In short, stone-tipped spears offer marginal improvement for far more resources consumed. It was still very useful to have purely wooden spears as backup.

Which occurred first, the spear or the hiking staff? Did early man started to use a stick to help him or her walk and then found could be used as a spear?

Why is there a debate about whether it was thrown or thrusted? What would your action be if you had that tool now? You'd either throw or thrust it, based on the situation, right? Tried to reproduce it for testing? Were all of you born adults, with no chance to experience childhood?

Tristan, I think this is a wonderful video! I listened to your audio podcast first and thought it would have been nice to see what you were looking at! This video came as a suggestion today. Glad to see it!❤️👍

These spears are amazingly multi-purpose in their simplicity. Use the narrower end as a lance, and the thicker end as a weighted spear. You could even discipline teenagers or unruly livestock with a quick whack.

I've learnt to nap rocks 60 years ago in my 20 s I live in the mountains for a little over 2 years . My walking stick I used every day one end was sharp an fire hardened. In the end I used it for small game ...birds spearing fish ECT. Also my finer spear points were made in the winter while hold up in a cave for the winter

@27:31-27:41: Mentions Congo, which is in Central Africa, but shows an image of Maasai warriors near the Ngorongoro Crater, which is in Tanzania, East Africa.

"it's not just a sharpened stick" the sharpened stick: 👁️👄👁️

Pointed at both ends so when one end is broken off say in a target after a thrust the other end is usable as well.

Wooden spears are going to have a use even to people who know how to work stone. If you're a hunter-gatherer you have to use the materials to hand. Good stone isn't available everywhere. Different environments have different geology and in many places the bedrock is a long way down, or the predominant forms of rock are too soft to make useful tools, or too tough to be worked easily. Nomadic people may have picked up supplies of stones when they passed through an area that had them, and they may have traded with other groups that had stone to spare. But it would always be sensible to be able to make weapons and tools from a variety of materials so you can still hunt if you don't have any good rocks nearby.

Adding a stone tip to spears certainly makes sense. But the peculiar thing is that it is enough to attach a tiny tip to achieve the same effect as with a large, elaborately manufactured spearhead. That experienced hunters who should not have known that a tiny tip (size of a fingernail) is quite sufficient to enable penetration of even very thick skin of a prey seems quite strange in this context.

Tristen always covers the coolest content.

wonderful speaker and excellent talk. I have also heard the Kent state archeologist speak on tool usage in person! also very interesting!!!

My guess would be retrievability... if you might lose your spear e.g. cause you still were chasing an animal or it might go over a hillside the wooden tip might the better choice as it's easier to replace, the stone tip would be preserved for "sure shots" or giving the killing blow. A wooden shaft would be far less effort to replace when broken than a good tip you could not get back...

Sometimes you need a $3000 Tikka in 7mm 08, and sometimes you only need a Cooey single shot 22lr. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, sometimes the hunt requires something powerful and high end, sometimes the simple and old is enough and it’s cheaper. A stone tipped spear is much harder to make and a missed shot can easily break it.

enjoyable program with a knowledgeable and pretty lady, great information

Absolutely excellent

Great talk Dr. Milks!

I love this channel I'm shocked there's less than a million subscribers 😮! It's like the History channel except history hit actually plays History. Amazing right!

Thank you for this video.

Many are still unsure whether Clactonians form part of any human group, even today.

@19:08. I find cherokee artifacts all the time & they used the same technology of preparing a flake/tool before knocking it off the "mother" stone. Super cool to see it goes back 400k years.

Stone point spears make a larger wound track allowing a animal to bleed out faster thru the track than what a sharpened wooden spear would do. The wooden spear would compress around the wound track and not allow blood to flow as freely.

Fascinating. I have often thought about what I'd do if I suddenly awoke naked and alone in some prehistoric era. I task myself with getting a long, strong stick to jab with and a few throwing sized rocks. Then shelter and food.

If you are bipedal with hands you are going to carry a spear, because if you don't you will become a predator's meal. This almost certainly goes back a long time. Consider Lucy: a little over three feet tall and walking around in an environment with lions, hyenas, and leopards, among others. Human bipedality makes you slow, too slow to run away from predators. However, bipedality means you can carry a sharpened stick, making it dangerous for predators to attack you, especially if you travel in groups. Predators don't take risks it they don't have to. A group of 3-5 foot tall apes might look tasty to a lion, but those sticks... I imagine if you went back two million years to East Africa, you would never see Hominins wandering around without spears.

Just looking at the design of the spear suggests to me that it was "set against a charge". Drive the herd towards a narrowed passage and the hominids lept into the passage at the last minute and jabbed one end into the ground and let the animal's momentum impale it on the set spear.

That's a fighting spear. The purpose of sharpening both ends is so you can stab with both ends. So, example parry with back end then stab up into throat or eyes. It reminds me of Massai spears which often has a butt spike as well as the spear blade.

Would a wooden spear leave identifiable marks on bones? They could kill an animal by penetrating a blood vessel, or vital organs (heart, lung), causing bleeding, shock, or loss of function without cutting any bones encountered. Any impact damage (say skull fracture or even rib breaks) would probably be indistinguishable from blunt instruments like clubs.

Finally a Neanderthal recreation that isnt clearly biased towards some racial ideological agenda. Much appreciated. Why would a Neanderthal have Germanic features as opposed to Basque? Indo-European vs non-Indo-European. Cartoon Propaganda vs OBSERVABLE facts

Very good question and answer.

IMO, Rocks, and Gravity were the earliest/ oldest weapons. The fire was right up there...

Great video

With the double taper weighted toward on end, the spears could certainly be thrown

Absolutely fascinating!

Very intresting

If you have the opportunity , visit this museum! It's really worth a visit .

What is another name for "spear"? "Digging stick"! I suspect there were many more digging sticks than spears and they would need the same properties as the spear you described, but without a stone tip. Those heavy jaws of the Neanderthal weren't for chewing tough, raw meat, but tough, raw roots, grasses and leaves. A digging stick is usually called a woman's tool, so they are usually denigrated as a lesser tool, but the Gatherers tend to provide more food than the hunters and other tools are ignored because they are not recognized as tools, things like nets and baskets made from vines, grasses and bark, useful for sclepping all that Hunter-Gatherer kit around.

Good Video, lady got excited at the thought of a hunting site LOL

i've been raised on "neanderthals couldn't conceptualize projectile weapons". and ofc, as a good student, i repeated it, despite always feeling a little icked by it. i was really glad when the spears where dated and thus assigned to neanderthals

Here's a question on the practicality of wooden spears. Neanderthals are often potrayed as a more robust, stronger species than Homo sapiens. Depending on how much more, how would a Neanderthal female compare to a modern fit human male? I'm thinking about all those skeletal markers for increased muscle strength. The reason I'm asking is when thrust a wooden spear will easily penetrate the abdominal wall of many possible prey species. I was going to comment that doing this with a horse would be easier than with a rhinoceros - that butchered straight tusk elephant shows why we need skilled paleontologist like this lady. Awesome video!

Those are some seriously hefty spears! Could see them taking down big prey, or big predators.

Precious specimens like these should not be touched with bare hands.

I live next to Schöningen but really have never been to the museum

I have heard that the American Natives used wet rawhide strips to hold the stone points onto wood shafts. When the rawhide dries it holds quite tightly.

I think they were making wooden spears because they could be produced quickly. It seems like they wouldnt be carrying around lots of weopons because they needed to be highly mobile and cover vast distances.

It took half way through the interview to confirm my suspicions that we were looking at reproductions, and to finally discuss how they were made and used. The question remains where are the original spears and what do they look like. The reproductions look very straight and perfectly shaped and rather heavy.

I don't remember hearing if the points of the spears were fire hardened. This would make them stronger and not as likely to break upon impact.

There they are! I was wondering what happened to my spears.

are they sharp on both tips in case one tip breaks off? maybe wooden tools predate stone tools?

I wonder how many times someone has found a, "pointy stuck," and had no idea that they were holding a spear from half-a-million years ago? If you don't know what you're looking at it's just a pointy stick, isn't it? Not so many people have the training to recognize one, do they?

Why the background music, it makes it difficult for hard of hearing people to hear what’s being said?

My question is, were spears initially walking sticks that were intentionally honed after being cut to size, then fit to the person’s gait, and shaved to modify the overall weight and shape to the person’s liking, for both throwing and walking with? They were obviously hunting tools, and a vast majority of hunting is tracking; and a walking stick is a nice tool for navigating a variety of terrain. I am just saying, the way spears are held in reconstructions and artwork really strikes me as driving a narrative that paints our ancestors in a way that doesn’t indicate that they cared about how they looked, or how simultaneously strong and agile they were. Most animals groom and hominins are obviously invested in being attractive and have style for that ancient cultural moment probably had some interesting beauty regimens. The imagery instead making these people look sloppy, aggressive and dumb. This wholly flattens what life would have actually looked like for these peoples. Humans had a lot of time on their hands before we started farming… messing about and playing with what was available, I am sure the dudes wandering around vast territories, tracking food, and making hunting strategies or just hanging about with their mates, they would probably want to customize their tools just so. Think about how little kids pick sticks, they have to be just right and some kids like to have a bunch of sticks and try them out and others like to choose just the perfect stick. You can’t tell me that there wasn’t some healthy and unhealthy competition happening between siblings and mates back in the day, driving experimentation and variation in the early tools made by hominins.

I wonder what should one study to get cool obs like these. Awesome discussion.

If I understood correctly, humankind began to use flint points and stone tools about 230,000 years ago, and the earliest known points/tools were discovered at sites in Europe and the Near East. Doesn't this push the dawn of proper humans back to a time earlier than often stated? If so, wouldn't the earliest artifacts be in Africa?

The rocks, especially the gray, are fine knapping material.

Whilst Dr Milks correctly refers to these spear users as hominids, Tristan however refers to them as humans as does the title of this video. These artefacts are not human artefacts and it is somewhat human centric to claim they are. As 400,000 years ago Humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) did not exist on the planet. There are multiple branches of Hominids and not all hominids are the ancestors of humans. I am experienced in the handling and use of numerous hand weapons. As an observation the length and thickness of the spears shown in the video are very similar to the dimensions (although not the materials) of medieval thrusting spears. Although how Neanderthals and Homo Heidelbergensis would use them remains a matter of conjecture particularly in view of their different physiology when compared with Homo Sapiens Sapiens. 😀😀😀

Bone tips are a sharpenable hard material that could be used on spears. Many examples are recorded in history. Also, succesful hunters would have lots of bones.

I would argue that the oldest weapon in human history was more than likely a simple rock or a stick.

The tips of spear looks quite smooth / uniform, I wonder what type of tool was used to fashion spear shape in this harder wood?

As much as anything else, we not only had our long-distance legs, but we also had our arms/shoulders/upright posture. We could throw objects very fast and very far, in comparison to any other hominid type of animal. Take a baseball pitcher and instead of a baseball, give him a quarter-pound river-rock. Thrown accurately enough and he could decisively take out an apex predator such as large k-9s and cats. I also suggest that slings were used thousands of years earlier than spears. It was only when humans started to develop WAR that such things as spears and their technological improvements were composed.

That was fun. I like this kind of stuff

Another possible reason for both ends being sharpened on these spears, which you don't see on any modern hunter gathering groups, is that they are not spears. They could be fishing implements or part of traps like a pit trap. With a pit trap both ends need to be sharpened, one goes in the ground and the other in the animal. Regardless, those are made of softwood species and are not very strong. They also look very heavy and would not make very good throwing spears. Having a second sharp end pointing back at you would also be a terrible idea when thrusting into an animal that weighs up to a ton. I am having trouble seeing these as spears at all.

20:50 They are using both at the same time but for a different part of the hunt, throwing a wooden spear and missing will not mean having to make a new spear point while the javelin style spear is good enough for that job with any damage from a miss can be just whittled out. Thrusting with a stone point will be better with a wider and sharper edge. Throw javelin and use the stone spear to finish the animal. Cost in time, materials, and effort to replace a broken point compared to sharpening a stick is economical. Then it would be 1 person throwing and another thrusting, there would need to be teamwork for hunting to be successful, someone to flush the animals towards the trap, throwers hitting them as the run by and thrusters further up to finish them.

Would extra development of right arm musculature fix points not suggest a throwing motion development, implying spear throwing? If medieval bowmen can be identified from the skeletons then why not Neanderthal spear throwers?

From a hunting perspective is it possible that there is an advantage in using a purely wooden spear rather than a stone tipped one on a seasonal basis, for example a wooden point might be advantageous for softer skinned animals and stone tipped for tougher creatures such as bear? in effect using specialised weapons for specific game?

I think I'll go to Schöningen - need a road trip

It’s really interesting how that type of environment is able to preserve organic materials so well. It encapsulates the material and shields it from oxygen, which would otherwise cause wood to rot, as it absorbs the carbon from the wood and break it down molecularly. This woman is gorgeous and reminds me of Uma Thermon