January 25, 2019 5.18am EST

Neanderthals used to be portrayed as unintelligent and technologically deficient, a species that went extinct because of its inferiority to humans. But researchers now generally agree that Neanderthals were adept predators, innovative builders and symbolic thinkers. So how were early humans actually different from Neanderthals? It’s getting increasingly difficult to tell. But the capability to kill at a distance – such as with a bow and arrow – has long been thought of thought of as one important threshold in our human success story.

The earliest weapons we know of, likely made by Neanderthals, are simple wooden spears, and have been discovered at sites dating from 400,000 years ago. Recent research confirming that Neanderthals did use such spears to hunt definitively rejected outdated ideas that Neanderthals were only scavengers.

But exactly how they used the spears remains unclear. Early spears could have been used as contact weapons for thrusting into prey. But they could also have be thrown by hand as javelin or used for self-defence or as probes for locating frozen carcasses. Our experiment, published in Scientific Reports, is the first to study the ballistics and accuracy of such early spears when thrown by hand – shedding light on how these spears were actually used.

We worked with a group of six club-level javelin athletes from the UK who threw replicas of a spear from the 300,000-year-old Neanderthal site of Schöningen in Germany at targets set at different distances. We recorded when they hit and missed the target, and filmed release and impacts with high-speed video cameras. This allowed us to evaluate accuracy and capture aspects of flight and impact that have never been scientifically analysed.

More:
https://theconversation.com/neanderthals-javelin-athletes-helped-us-show-how-effective-they-were-at-hunting-with-weapons-110464

academic studies of ballistics, anatomy, and other things were done before someone had the bright idea to just throw the spears to see how it was done.

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