The wooden spears and throwing rocks from Schöningen in Lower Saxony are considered the oldest wooden hunting weapons in the world. Your layer of find was dated around 300,000 years. But now a new dating suggests that the famous spears are 100,000 years younger. Should this be confirmed, this would also have extensive consequences for your context and the assumptions for your Stone Age creators. So far, the spears were considered the work of Homo Heidelbergensis or another predecessor of the Neanderthals. However, if the wooden weapons are only 200,000 years old, they would have to come from Neanderthals. This throws a whole new light on the hunting techniques and weapons of European early people. However, the new dating is not undisputed – and it also did not date the spear itself, but only the surrounding sediment.
The former lignite mining of Schöningen in western Harzvorland is one of the most important sites of early human activity in Europe. Archaeologists have discovered up to 300,000 year old deposits, more than 1,500 stone covers and tools as well as the bones of numerous hidden animals, including 50 wild horses. Age and some recently discovered footprints suggest that these primeval hunting camps come from Homo Heidelbergensis – the alleged link between Homo erectus and the Neanderthal. The most famous is Schöningen for the finds for the finds of wood from this time. The arsenal comprises nine wooden spears, a lance and six snack sticks on both sides. The weapons together with the relics of the animals killed suggest that the early people were targeting animals at the time, which were on the banks of the once existing lake. “Nowhere else can such hunts be preserved so well and in such undisturbed context as in these layers of find from the Middle Pleistocene,” explain Jarod Hutson from the Monrepos – Leibniz Center for Archeology in Neuwied and his colleagues. “Since then, this site has served as a marker horizon for the development of premodern human hunting skills.”
New dating about fossil amino acids
But the wooden spear itself and its layer of find have never been dated directly. “Instead, the age estimates for the spear are based on a general correlation of the stratigraphic sequence with global paleoclimatological data and a cross dating of other fossil levels within the Schöninger opencast mine complex,” explain the archaeologists. Specifically, this means that researchers dated the layers over and under the spear layer, they bordered the age of the wooden weapons. However, the original dating had to be corrected from 400,000 to 300,000 years. But even with this age, Schöningen was a runaway under comparable finds. The team around Hutson has now checked the age of the Schöninger Speer horizon with a new dating method.
For their dating, the team used fossil horse teeth, mussel cancer shells and the capsules of small freshwater snails from sediment blocks of the spear find layer. They then analyzed the amino acids contained in these organic relics to their hand -handing – the symmetry of the molecules. “In living organisms, proteins consist exclusively of amino acids of the left -wing form,” explain Hutson and his colleagues. “However, a spontaneous razemization reaction takes place after death.” This means that some of the amino acids change their hand in the course of the protein decline until there is finally a balance of right-handed and left-handed molecules. Since the pace of this razemization is known and can be compared with fossil finds from other sites, the proportion of right -wing amino acids reveals how old it is.
Neanderthals instead of Homo Heidelbergensis
The new dating showed that the wooden spear from Schöningen must be younger than previously assumed. “Together with a re-evaluation of the regional central Pleistocene Chronostratigrafie, our data place the Schöningen-Speere in the period around 200,000 years ago,” the archaeologists write. This would be around 100,000 years younger than before. “However, this dating does not reduce the importance of this site – the archaeological significance of the spear horizon and the behaviors associated with it remain unchanged,” emphasize Hutson and his team. “The spear horizon provides clear evidence of the use of the Schöninger lake shore as a hunting area for hunting hunts, in which entire family herds were specifically hunted, killed and slaughtered.” In order to be successful in such hunts, the early people had to coordinate their actions well and work closely together as a group. The finds of Schöningen document this in a unique way – even after their new dating, as the archaeologists explain.
A decisive aspect of the Schöninger finds changes due to the new dating: the creators of the wooden hunting weapons. Because if the wooden spear is only 200,000 years old, they were most likely not made by Homo Heidelbergensis, but by his successor, the Neanderthal. “Our dating brings the Schöningen spear to the time of the European Neanderthals,” write Hutson and his colleagues. This fits that archaeological testimonies also suggest in other European sites that such community hunts established themselves around the time around 200,000 years ago with the Neanderthals. “Our revised age brings the Schöninger finds into a line with others from this period that testify to an increasing social complexity of Neanderthal behavior,” said the team.
However, it is still controversial how reliable the new dating is. Because the analysis procedure used by Hutson and his colleagues is relatively new. In addition, the age information determined by the handlebar of amino acids depends heavily on the temperatures that the fossils have experienced since their deposition. The less well documented the climate development of the location and the rehearsals used for comparison, the more inaccurate the process becomes. The sedimentologist and dating expert Tobias Lauer from the University of Tübingen therefore commented on Science: “I consider the data set presented here. But I am sure that this is not the last word. This result will probably not be accepted by all experts.”
Source: Jarod Hutson (Monrepos – Leibniz Center for Archeology, Neuwied) et al., Science Advances, Doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adv0752)))