Human Ancestors Made Deadly Stone-Tipped Spears 500,000 Years Ago
Replicas of the 500,000-year-old stone points from Kathu Pan 1 were hafted onto wooden dowels with acacia resin and sinew, and plunged into antelope carcasses. The resulting edge damage was consistent with the edge damage on the ancient stone points. Image: Courtesy of Jayne Wilkins
Human ancestors were fashioning sophisticated hunting weapons half a million years ago. An analysis of stone points from a site in South Africa called Kathu Pan 1 indicates that they were attached to shafts of wood and used as spears. The finding pushes the earliest appearance of hafted multicomponent tools back by some 200,000 years.
Previous discoveries had hinted at the potential antiquity of this technology. Based on evidence that both early modern humans and our closest relatives, the Neandertals, made stone-tipped spears, some researchers hypothesized that their common ancestor—a species called Homo heidelbergensis–shared this know-how. At half a million years old, the newfound stone points are old enough to be the handiwork of this common ancestor.
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