The Schöningen Spears: A 300,000-Year-Old Hunt

In 1994 an archaeological team led by Hartmut Thieme was monitoring the giant open-cast lignite mine at Schöningen, in Lower Saxony, Germany, when they noticed something odd in the wet black sediment: a pale, tapering shaft of wood about two metres long. Waterlogged mud had sealed it away from oxygen, and with it the bacteria and fungi that normally rot wood within decades.

It was a spear. Over the following years, more emerged, along with throwing sticks and thousands of butchered animal bones. When Thieme announced the find in Nature in 1997, it changed the way archaeologists thought about the earliest hunters.

What was found

The Schöningen deposits formed on the shore of a shallow lake during a warm interglacial. Excavations from 1994 have produced:

• Eight long spears, roughly 1.8 to 2.5 metres long, nearly all made from spruce, with one of pine.
• Two double-pointed sticks, about 65–80 centimetres long, that may have been thrown at animals or used in some kind of game.
• Stone flakes and scrapers, plus bone tools, used to butcher carcasses and work hides.
• The remains of at least twenty wild horses (Equus mosbachensis) with cut marks, along with red deer and bison.

A purpose-built museum, the paleon research and adventure centre, now stands beside the site.

Built like javelins

The spears are not just sharpened sticks. Studies by Thieme and later by Elisabeth Schoch and colleagues showed a deliberate design. The shaft is thickest about a third of the way back from the tip and tapers towards both ends, which puts the centre of gravity forward — exactly the balance of a modern competition javelin. The points appear to have been worked from the dense wood at the base of a young tree trunk, and the shafts were stripped of bark and carefully shaved.

That kind of form comes from planning and experience. The makers had to choose a suitable tree, understand which part of it gave heavy, tough wood, and shape it to fly.

How old are they?

Thieme originally put the site at around 400,000 years, in the interglacial known as MIS 11. A 2015 reassessment by Daniel Richter and Matthias Krbetschek, using luminescence dating of the sediments, favoured the younger end of the range: about 300,000 years, during MIS 9. The exact number is still discussed, which is why the age is best given as 300,000 to 400,000 years.

Either way, this is deep in the Middle Pleistocene. No human bones have been found at Schöningen, so we do not know for certain who made the spears. The likely candidates are early members of the Neanderthal lineage or Homo heidelbergensis.

Thrown or thrust?

The javelin-like balance suggested to Thieme that the spears were thrown. Replicas can be thrown accurately, but how far and how lethally is disputed. Experiments by Annemieke Milks and colleagues in 2019, using replicas thrown by trained athletes, found that hand-thrown wooden spears were effective only at fairly short range, on the order of 20 metres, and that a hunter would need to get close to the target. Getting close to horses, which are fast and alert, needs cooperation and planning — ambush at the lakeshore, perhaps, or driving a herd into shallow water.

Wherever the truth lies, the spears show that the hunt was a group activity with a defined plan.

Hunters or scavengers?

In the 1980s the archaeologist Lewis Binford argued that early humans were mainly scavengers, following carnivores and stealing scraps. It was a serious, influential hypothesis, and the evidence for early hunting was thin. Schöningen changed that. Hunting weapons, a herd of horses killed and processed at once, and evidence of systematic butchering with stone tools made it very hard to sustain the view that these humans could only scavenge.

Researchers have also reported burnt flint and other traces of fire at the site. The combination of fire, weapons and big-game hunting helps explain how humans managed to live in northern Europe through cold spells.

Older wood, younger spears

Schöningen is not the oldest wood used by humans, only the oldest complete weapons.

Kalambo Falls, Zambia

In 2023 Larry Barham and colleagues reported two interlocking, notched logs from Kalambo Falls, dated by luminescence to about 476,000 years ago. If confirmed as a structure, it is the oldest known use of wood for building, made by a species that predates Homo sapiens.

Clacton and Lehringen

The yew tip from Clacton-on-Sea in England, found in 1911, is around 400,000 years old. At Lehringen in Germany, a 2.4 metre yew spear was found in 1948 between the ribs of a straight-tusked elephant, in a layer about 120,000 years old and associated with Neanderthals.

Together these finds remind us how much is missing. Almost everything early humans made from wood, bark, hide and fibre has vanished. What survives is a rare glimpse of a much richer toolkit.

Why Schöningen matters

It shows that by 300,000 years ago, humans in Europe were making specialised, well-designed weapons, planning collective hunts of large animals and butchering them systematically. Every one of those skills is usually associated with later, more “modern” humans. Schöningen suggests they had much deeper roots.