In a groundbreaking discovery, an international team of researchers has presented 500,000-year-old stone spearheads from South Africa. These findings are approximately 200,000 years older than any comparable artifacts of their kind. Instead of pointed wooden spears, our human ancestors were already using sharpened and chipped stone tips for their hunting tools half a million years ago. According to Jayne Wilkins from the University of Toronto in Canada, the common ancestors of the Neanderthal and modern humans must have possessed a highly developed weapon technology. The recently presented artifacts were excavated from the Kathu Pan 1 site in South Africa and were discovered 30 years ago. However, it was only with today’s technology that an accurate age determination of the spearheads was possible.
An in-depth examination of the spearheads led the researchers to conclude that they were indeed attached to wooden poles around half a million years ago. Surface wear on the stone tips suggests that the ancient hunters were very successful with this hunting tool. To confirm this theory, the scientists made copies of the spears and used a dead springbok as prey. The injury marks on the animal showed that stone spearheads were much more successful than just pointed wooden spears. The experiment showed that a spear with a stone tip was much more effective in hunting, even though it was more labor-intensive to produce than a wooden spear.
The discovery of these stone spearheads changes our understanding of the development of intellectual abilities in the human family tree before our own species emerged. This finding suggests that a common ancestor of both human forms was already so creative and had developed such effective hunting tools 200,000 years earlier than previously thought. This discovery is a significant contribution to our understanding of human evolution and the development of technology.
