2023-11-06 19:13:48
Examples of experimental spears and javelins armed with replicas of archaeological flint points. – ULIÈGE/TRACEOLAB
MADRID, 6 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The hunter-gatherers who settled on the banks of the Haine, a river in southern Belgium, 31,000 years ago they already used spear propellers to hunt.
This is the conclusion of a new study carried out in TraceoLab of the University of Liège.
Material found at the Maisières-Canal archaeological site allows us to establish the use of this hunting technique 10,000 years before the oldest spear throwers currently known. This discovery, published in the journal Scientific Reports, is leading archaeologists to reconsider the age of this important technological innovation.
The spearthrower (also known as spearthrower, dartthrower, stolic or atlatl) is a weapon designed to launch darts, which are large arrow-like projectiles that generally measure more than two meters in length. Launchers can throw darts up to 80 meters away.
The invention of long-range hunting weapons has had important consequences for human evolution, as it changed hunting practices and the dynamics between humans and their prey, as well as the diet and social organization of prehistoric groups of hunter-gatherers. Therefore, the date of invention and diffusion of these weapons has long been the subject of lively debate within the scientific community.
“Until now, the first weapons were very difficult to detect in archaeological sites because they were made of organic components that are rarely preserved,” he explains. it’s a statement Justin Coppe, researcher at TraceoLab. “The stone points that armed ancient projectiles and are much more frequently found in archaeological excavations have been difficult to reliably connect to specific weapons.”
More recently published claims about the early use of spear and bow launchers in Europe and Africa have relied exclusively on the size of the projectile tip to link them to these weapons systems. However, ethnographic reviews and experimental tests have cast serious doubt on this line of reasoning. by showing that the heads of arrows, darts and spears can be highly variable in size, with overlapping ranges.
The innovative approach developed by TraceoLab archaeologists combines ballistic analysis and fracture mechanics to better understand the traces preserved in flint points. “We carried out a large-scale experiment in which we fired replicas of Paleolithic projectiles using different weapons such as spears, bows and spear throwers,” explains Noora Taipale, researcher at the FNRS (Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research) at TraceoLab.
“By carefully examining the fractures in these stone points, we were able to understand how each weapon affected the fracture of the points when they impacted the target.” Each weapon left distinct marks on the stone points, allowing archaeologists to relate these marks to archaeological finds. In a way, it’s like identifying a gun by the marks left by the barrel on the bullet, a known practice in forensic science.
The excellent match between the sample of experimental launchers and the Maisières-Canal projectiles confirmed that these weapons were used by the hunters who occupied the site. This finding encourages archaeologists to further apply the method to discover how old long-range weaponry really is.. Future work in TraceoLab will focus on adjusting the analytical approach to other archaeological contexts to help achieve this goal.
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