To kill an animal remotely, prehistoric hunters would have had to develop javelins with certain ballistic properties. Back in the Pleistocene, these weapons generally consisted of stone points hafted onto wooden shafts, yet very few organic components have survived to the present day, which means researchers have precious few examples of these ancient spears to work with.

“We have a few wooden spears, with the oldest one being a 400,000-year-old fragment from Clacton-on-Sea in England,” study co-author Dr Dirk Leder told IFLScience. “Then there’s Schöningen at 300,000 years old and Lehringen at 120,000 years old,” both in Germany. “That’s about it.” 

What’s unclear, however, is whether these spears were designed to be thrown from a distance or simply thrust into prey animals while in the hunter’s hand.

Far more abundant than these wooden elements are the spears’ inorganic components, like stone points that once sat atop them and have remained intact for hundreds of millennia. To discern how these piercing spearheads might have been used, researchers often measure their cross-section and then compare these values with ethnographic weapons that they know the function of, such as those used by more recent hunter-gatherers.

Based on this approach, it was recently suggested that the oldest stone points in southern Africa and the Levant were of similar dimensions to ethnographic thrusting spears. According to this research, points that were suitable for throwing spears did not appear until around 190,000 years ago, with the implication being that humans living prior to this date hadn’t yet developed ballistic weapons.

Explaining the problems with this method, though, Leder said that “in contrast to throwing spears, thrusting spear [tip] cross sections are larger on average. But that’s just the average. When you look at every spear individually, you end up with a ginormous overlap between thrusting spears, throwing spears, and even spear throwers in some cases.”

Presenting new analyses of the wooden weapons from Clacton-on-Sea, Schöningen, and Lehringen, the study authors determined that the tip cross-section approach “involves too many morphometric overlaps to be especially useful as a means of determining mode of spear delivery,” they write in their paper. Instead, they state that “the only measurements that were found to reliably correlate with mode of delivery were length, the location of the maximum diameter in relation to its overall length […], and point of balance.”

“We have the advantage of having complete wooden spears and not just a spear tip,” said Leder. “So we can say something about the point of balance, which is a very interesting aerodynamic feature.” 

Specifically, the researchers found that “whenever you have a throwing spear, the point of balance in the spear would be in the front half or front third.” In contrast, Leder explained that thrusting spears “don’t need this aerodynamic feature.”

Crucially, the authors found that the point of balance for all of the Schöningen spears was located in the front half, making them suitable for throwing. Conversely, the Lehringen spear’s point of balance was towards the back, suggesting that it wouldn’t have made a decent projectile and was therefore more likely to have been used as a thrusting spear.

This conclusion is backed up by experiments in which trained weapons experts tested out replicas of the Schöningen spears, finding that they were more effective at penetrating horse hides when thrown from a distance than when thrust. According to the authors, these findings can’t categorically prove that the 300,000-year-old weapons from Schöningen were used as javelins, but merely demonstrate that the technological capacity for hunting with projectiles was in place at that time.

“We’re quite confident based on this data – point of balance – that we are dealing with throwing spears at Schöningen, and that throwing has been around for at least 300,000 years, and probably much longer,” said Leder.

The study is published in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.