Human ancestors were using stone-tipped spears to hunt 500,000 years ago, 200,000 years earlier than previously thought.
A new study reports that the stone tips, found in South Africa, were probably once attached to wooden spears and then hurled at animals by hominins of the species Homo heidelbergensis.
Homo heidelbergensis was the last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals, said Jayne Wilkins, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto and the study?s first author. The spears ?suggest that the behavioral complexity of these early humans was greater than expected,? she said. Creating a stone-tipped spear would have required attaching stone to wood, handling multiple types of material at once, planning and goal-oriented behavior.
Dr. Wilkins and colleagues from Arizona State University and the University of Cape Town in South Africa report their findings in the current issue of the journal Science.
The stone tips were found at an archaeological site called Kathu Pan 1 in the 1980s. In 2010, the tips were dated. But it was unclear whether the tips were actually used in hunting. ?They could have been used for cutting or butchery,? Dr. Wilkins said. ?We wanted to make sure.?
She and her colleagues compared the wear and breakage in the stone tips to modern spear points fired into the carcass of an African gazelle called a springbok. The ancient stone points had breakage patterns consistent with those of the modern tips, Dr. Wilkins said.
The idea of attaching a stone tip to a spear, known as hafting, was a critical advance in hunting. By using a spear with a piercing stone tip, early humans could cause their prey to bleed and die faster. It is a technique that was later used by both Neanderthals and early modern humans. ?But we didn?t really know the antiquity of that practice until now,? Dr. Wilkins said.
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