Within the hilly landscape of northern Europe, the Schöningen site has come to represent probably the most important archeological site in the world as far as early human military tactics and technological abilities are concerned. This old open-pit mine has yielded several Middle Pleistocene sites since the start of excavation in 1981, with the oldest known wooden tools to humankind.
Among others, ten spears and two DPS or throwing sticks come from Schöningen 13 II-4. These have become the real catalyst for the hunter vs. scavenger debate, in terms of tangible evidence of early human hunting. The site, which dates to around 300,000 years ago, was a lakeshore during the interglacial and had very special conditions that allowed hundreds of natural and worked wood remains to survive.
These wooden early hunting weapons have drastically altered our understanding of human hunting capabilities, social interaction, and cognitive development in its early stages. The earliest known European wooden spears are the Schöningen spears, dated to between 400,000 and 120,000 years. Along with the earliest throwing sticks, these weapons provide evidence of the advanced hunting practices adopted by early humans.
The best-preserved and oldest hunting weapons were recovered at the Schöningen site, and the findings have provided unique insights into past human hunting behavior, cognition, and social organization. This exceptional preservation of organic materials artifacts, bones, insect remains, and pollen provided the holistic paleoenvironmental record which has been at the center of this interdisciplinary research for approximately 30 years.
The Schöningen spears are a series of nine spears, two throwing sticks, and one lance, considered outstanding documents of early human active hunting ability. These tools documented evidence of coordinated social interaction and planning skills other words, capacities that were earlier thought to be ascribed only to modern humans. The technological assemblage of the hunting weapons from Schöningen was created at a period when Homo heidelbergensis already belonged to Europe while the anatomical emergence of Neanderthals and modern humans had also just begun.
Accelerated brain growth, as it occurred in human evolution since about 2.5 million years ago, strongly increased with Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens. The causes for this growth are seen in food diversification and reliable access to animal food resources. The hunting weapons from Schöningen mark this important milestone in human history, which reflects the result of a sustainable transfer of technological knowledge and socially organized hunting behavior across population boundaries.
The discovery of the Schöningen spears concluded a decade-long research debate that had denied active hunting of large game to Neanderthals and other species before Homo sapiens. A paradigm change opened all further socio-cognitive, linguistic, and technological capabilities of Pleistocene humans for reevaluation and brought them closer to modern humans.
Schöningen has yielded the oldest evidence of complex hunting technologies and behavior in Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies. The archaeological record indicates that Homo heidelbergensis was an effective hunter of the North Eurasian Plain. The technological knowledge necessary for fashioning effective hunting weapons and the knowledge of social organization needed for hunting behavior were passed on, sustainably, to each succeeding generation to ensure the survival of early humans during the Ice Age in Eurasia.
The Schöningen site represents the traditional hunter-gatherer lifeways and early woodworking traditions in a very special way. It provides botanical and faunal evidence, as well as stone, bone, and wood artifacts, which document repetitive patterns of subsistence and socio-economic behavior from approximately 300,000 years ago. This forms an outstanding record of traditional land use by a past human society.