TECHNOLOGY × SUBSISTENCE

The Schoningen Hunting Spears

~300,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · MIS 8

Wooden spears about 300,000 years old, preserved in a German lake shore, show that early humans hunted large game with thrown weapons.

Schoningen is a Lower Palaeolithic site in Lower Saxony, Germany, brought to light in 1994 during the working of an open-cast lignite mine. Waterlogged sediments from an ancient lake shore preserved worked wood there, a material that survives only exceptionally: its decay is the work of micro-organisms that require air, and permanently saturated ground denies it to them. The inventory comprises 187 wooden objects, shaped by a wide range of techniques including the lengthwise splitting of a trunk, among them at least 20 hunting weapons, long spears and double-pointed throwing sticks. One such stick, made from a spruce branch, was debarked and shaped, the wood probably seasoned beforehand to prevent splitting; its range is estimated at some thirty metres.

Why it matters

Stone survives everywhere and wood almost nowhere, which gives the site a particular documentary value: it provides access to the perishable part of Palaeolithic equipment, in all likelihood the larger part. The objects are not sharpened branches but designed weapons, which implies planning, acquired skill and hunts organised in advance. They are not the work of Homo sapiens, absent from Europe at this date, but of earlier European populations, ancestors and relatives of the Neanderthals.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Wood is beyond the reach of the usual dating methods, and the age of the spears is inferred from that of the deposits containing them, which is why the question remains open. Early estimates placed the site near 400,000 years, later revised to about 300,000. Amino acid racemisation dating applied in 2025 to fossils from the find layer proposed roughly 200,000 years, which would attribute the weapons to Neanderthals, in a period when communal hunting was developing. The debate is unresolved.

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