Stone-Tipped Spears Half a Million Years Old!

[Sunstone]

It seems stone tipped spears are half a million years old, dating back to a common ancestor of our species and Neanderthals. Source.

 

[Amechania]

So a big-brained hominid hafted a stone tip to a spear much earlier than previously believed, according to this study, thereby improving hunting ability to acquire more meat to fuel a brain ever increasing in size. Is that right? Makes me wonder why it took so long for subsequent species of humans (with their larger brains) to fundamentally improve on the stone-tipped spear invented by Heidelbergensis.

 

[Sunstone]

So a big-brained hominid hafted a stone tip to a spear much earlier than previously believed, according to this study, thereby improving hunting ability to acquire more meat to fuel a brain ever increasing in size. Is that right? Makes me wonder why it took so long for subsequent species of humans (with their larger brains) to fundamentally improve on the stone-tipped spear invented by Heidelbergensis.

Excellent question! I wonder the same thing. It seems like it took ages at first, then snowballed in the flash of an eye.

 

[oldbadger]

So a big-brained hominid hafted a stone tip to a spear much earlier than previously believed, according to this study, thereby improving hunting ability to acquire more meat to fuel a brain ever increasing in size. Is that right? Makes me wonder why it took so long for subsequent species of humans (with their larger brains) to fundamentally improve on the stone-tipped spear invented by Heidelbergensis.

This is all amazing! Do you have any idea when the atl-atl appeared on-scene, because that propelled these spears four times faster and further than before, That was a giant leap as well.

 

[Sunstone]

This is all amazing! Do you have any idea when the atl-atl appeared on-scene, because that propelled these spears four times faster and further than before, That was a giant leap as well.

Unfortunately, I have no idea when it appeared. Fascinating question, though!

 

[crossfire]

Spearthrowers were prolly made from mostly from wood, which would be less likely to survive than the stone spearheads. (Athough I have seen some spearthrowers make from antlers that have survived.)

I've only heard of spearthrowers being associated with Cro-Magnon.

 

[Sylvan]

This is not surprising to me. Has anyone encountered any support for the theory that the reason we were able to eliminate/absorb Neanderthal and presumably others of our hominid relatives is that Homo Sapiens was the only one capable of large group intercooperation? Despite the superior intellectual capacity of Neanderthal, that they may still have had 'hard-wired' interpersonal dominance structures to such a heavy degree that assembling an army or even cohesive community of 100+ would have been a literal impossibility?

This is a friend of mines pet theory.

 

[crossfire]

This is not surprising to me. Has anyone encountered any support for the theory that the reason we were able to eliminate/absorb Neanderthal and presumably others of our hominid relatives is that Homo Sapiens was the only one capable of large group intercooperation? Despite the superior intellectual capacity of Neanderthal, that they may still have had 'hard-wired' interpersonal dominance structures to such a heavy degree that assembling an army or even cohesive community of 100+ would have been a literal impossibility?

This is a friend of mines pet theory.

From what I've read about Neanderthals, the physical trauma to their bodies most closely resembles that of bull riders in rodeos today. Keep in mind that Neanderthal bones are much more robust than ours, and the fractures they displayed indicate quite a bit of violence. {Prolly from hunting the megafauna of that time. Either that, or they were the only ones robust enough to survive an encounter with the megafauna of the time. This just might point to a "dominance" problem. }

 

[tumbleweed41]

So that's where I left those spears...

 

[Noaidi]

So a big-brained hominid hafted a stone tip to a spear much earlier than previously believed, according to this study, thereby improving hunting ability to acquire more meat to fuel a brain ever increasing in size. Is that right? Makes me wonder why it took so long for subsequent species of humans (with their larger brains) to fundamentally improve on the stone-tipped spear invented by Heidelbergensis.

The work of Steven Mithen may be useful in explaining this. The idea is one of cognitive fluidity:

"Cognitive fluidity is a term first popularly applied by Mithen in his book The Prehistory of the Mind, a search for the origins of Art, Religion and Science.
The term cognitive fluidity describes how a modular primate mind has evolved into the modern human mind by combining different ways of processing knowledge and using tools to create a modern civilization. By arriving at original thoughts, which are often highly creative and rely on metaphor and analogy modern humans differ from archaic humans. As such, cognitive fluidity is a key element of the human attentive consciousness. The term has been principally used to contrast the mind of modern humans, especially those after 50,000 B.P. (before present), with those of archaic humans such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus. The latter appear to have had a mentality that was original domain-specific in structure; a series of largely isolated cognitive domains for thinking about the social, material, and natural worlds. These are termed “Swiss penknife minds” with a set of special modules for specific domains such as Social, Natural history, General, Technical and Language intelligence. With the advent of modern humans the barriers between these domains appear to have been largely removed in the attentive mode and hence cognition became more fluid."
Steven Mithen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[angellous_evangellous]

It seems stone tipped spears are half a million years old, dating back to a common ancestor of our species and Neanderthals. Source.

That's cool.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

It seems stone tipped spears are half a million years old, dating back to a common ancestor of our species and Neanderthals. Source.

Thanks for this! I don't check Science as frequently as I probably should (it's so general and released so frequently that whatever "big stories" are present are frequently far less technical than they should be). It's not so much the central finding (that Homo heidelbergensis or some other member of the genus were "manufacturing hafted multicomponent tools ~200,000 years earlier than previously thought" that I find interesting, but their use of shape analysis to determine the probability that the stones were in fact spear tips. The ability for humans to classify "objects" into abstract categories (like "spears" or "magazinges", which have physical instantiations, or like "nouns" or "ideas", which do not), is probably the most fundamental cognitive process. One problem with understanding how it works is knowing what it is that makes us classify, say, something as a "staff" vs. a "spear" or a "sword" vs. a "dagger". Another problem is getting computers to do this. Both rely on being able to look at "shape", or the morphological characteristics of some class of physical objects, and analyze how we use these to determine whether something is e.g,. just an oddly shaped rock or is a spear tip. I've seen shape analysis used, and techniques for it developed, in machine learning literature, and to a lesser extent in neuroimaging and behavioural studies within cognitive (neuro)psychology, but this is a new one for me.

 

[Trimijopulos]

It seems stone tipped spears are half a million years old, dating back to a common ancestor of our species and Neanderthals. Source.

"They're associated in Europe and Asia with Neanderthals and in Africa with humans and our nearest ancestors," said Wilkins.

Obviously Sunstone and Mrs. Wilkins are advocates of the funny Out-of-Africa theory which teaches that the only humans were those African immigrants who started from south Africa 70,000 years ago.

Neandertals and moderns belong to the same species. The speciation that produced the species “Sapiens” occurred approximately 600,000 years ago. Unfortunately the OoA theory is a quite racist theory.

 

[tumbleweed41]

... Unfortunately the OoA theory is a quite racist theory.

Explain.

 

[Trimijopulos]

Explain.

The Out-of-Africa theory regards as humans only the so-called Homo sapiens sapiens who came out of Africa. Neither those who remained behind in Africa, nor those who lived at the time in Europe and Asia. It teaches that these non-human, or at least non modern humans, were archaic populations which were “replaced” (does not explain what that means) by the Hss without interbreeding –presumably because no interbreeding was thought as possible between different species.

They are now “re-thinking” the theory because of the interbreeding detected so much between Hss and Neandertals as between Hss and Denisovans.
Yet, the fact remains that since 1930 they knew that certain characteristics of the denture of the Asians were found only in the modern Asian population –and the American Indians who went to the Americas from Asia- and the Asian Homo erectus.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

The Out-of-Africa theory regards as humans only the so-called Homo sapiens sapiens who came out of Africa. Neither those who remained behind in Africa, nor those who lived at the time in Europe and Asia.

That is ignorant nonsense.

 

[tumbleweed41]

The Out of Africa hypothesis concludes, through genetic and fossil evidence, that all modern humans are descended from archaic humans who migrated out of Africa.
Whether or not some may have later produced offspring with descendents of earlier proto-human migrants does not change this.

And I still fail to see how any of this is "racist".

 

[Secret Chief]

I got older stuff in the back of my fridge.

 

[Trimijopulos]

That is ignorant nonsense.

I my self do not think that you are ignorant; only misguided.
Surely you know who Chris Stringer is. Well, he is “re-thinking” the OoA hypothesis.
He writes the following in his webpage:

At the moment, I'm looking again at the whole question of a recent African origin for modern humans—the leading idea over the last 20 years. This argues that we had a recent African origin, that we came out of Africa, and that we replaced all of the other human forms that were outside of Africa. But we're having to re-evaluate that now because genetic data suggest that the modern humans who came out of Africa about 60,000 years ago probably interbred with Neanderthals, first of all, and then some of them later on interbred with another group of people called the Denisovans, over in south eastern Asia.
​

I suggest that you come back after having read the article.

The Out of Africa hypothesis concludes, through genetic and fossil evidence, that all modern humans are descended from archaic humans who migrated out of Africa.

That is entirely wrong!
The Chinese did not come out of Africa. They are descendants of the Asian Homo erectus and according to OoA they are no modern humans because only the African immigrants are considered modern humans.

And I still fail to see how any of this is "racist".

It is racist because, as I already explained, those Africans who remained behind in Africa –whose descendants are today’s s-S (sub-Saharan) Africans- were not considered modern humans but “archaic hominins”.

 

[Sunstone]

It is racist because, as I already explained, those Africans who remained behind in Africa –whose descendants are today’s s-S (sub-Saharan) Africans- were not considered modern humans but “archaic hominins”.

I've read accounts of the Out of Africa Theory before this and there has never been any mention at all that the Theory indicates today's Sub-Saharan Africans are archaic hominims. Perhaps you should check your sources.