Lower Palaeolithic Hunting Weapons from Schöningen, Germany—The Oldest Spears in the World

Since 1983, the development of the lignite opencast mine at Schöningen in Eastern Lower Saxony has been accompanied by large-scale rescue excavations conducted by the Bodendenkmalpflege, Hannover, Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments. In the course of these operations since 1992, in the Quaternary layers of the opencast mine, several Lower Palaeolithic sites from the time of Homo erectus have been discovered and partially investigated. One of these sites-a horse hunting camp-has now yielded, among other items, eight wooden javelins. With an age of 400,000 years, these implements are, up to now, the oldest-known completely preserved hunting weapons of mankind. They revise the common conception of the early hominid as a marginal scavenger and substantiate the existence of systematic, methodical big-game hunting and even hunting specialisation as well as high-level skills in wood-working at this early period.