The site at Schöningen in the northern European Plains has become a key site in our understanding of early human military capability. Excavations of this former opencast mine began in 1981 and have revealed a variety of Middle Pleistocene sites that have subsequently exposed the oldest wooden tools to have ever become known from humankind. Among them, the ten spears and two double-pointed sticks or throwing sticks from Schöningen 13 II-4 have revolutionized our perception of early human hunting and combat strategies.
Site Schöningen 13 II-4 represents an old interglacial lakeshore and dates to the Marine Isotope Stage 9. The unique preservation conditions at this site have enabled the recovery of hundreds of natural and worked wooden remains, making it a privileged site for the research of early wooden artifacts and the related human behavior of woodworking. Some of these early wooden hunting weapons directed a lot of information at early human hunting abilities, social interaction, and hominin cognition.
Although the first indirect dating of woodworking comes from 2-1.5 million years ago, the direct evidence in the numerical dating of use-wear on lithics for wood artifacts is from Africa and the Middle East, dating 780 thousand years ago. The Schöningen spears belong to the age of 400-120 thousand years ago and are up to now the oldest known wooden spears in Europe. With this, it sets the debate that pits hunters against scavengers regarding early humans, showing them to have been active hunters rather than sheer scavengers.
The site is located near the village of Schöningen in the state of Lower Saxony, Germany. It was discovered in 1992 in advance of opencast lignite mining. Since then, systematic excavation has been led by the Lower Saxony State Office for Heritage (NLD) and, since 2008, in cooperation with the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (HEP). In 2016, the mining site closed.
The nine spears and similar throwing equipment in Schöningen are exceptional in demonstrating active human hunting in the Lower Paleolithic period. Their manufacture attests to the social cooperation and long-range planning capacities that were previously only attributed to modern humans. In that sense, the Schöningen effect has brought about a completely new understanding of technological, cognitive, and social capabilities among earlier human species, rendering them much nearer to us than one had assumed earlier.
The technological ensemble of these spears was fashioned at a moment in time when Homo heidelbergensis was living in Europe, and the anatomies in both Neanderthals and modern humans had only just begun to develop. In this regard, the spread of powerful hunting technologies across species and population boundaries was likely crucial for the successful spread of all human species throughout the Pleistocene. Schöningen is an unsurpassed instance of this technological and social exchange.
The rapid expansion of the brain in the course of human evolution started about 2.5 million years ago and further increased with Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens. It is associated with diversification in food and increased access to animal food resources in more reliable quantities. The hunting weapons from Schöningen document this important step in human history: here, it is the consequence of the sustained transfer of technological knowledge and socially organized hunting behavior across population boundaries.
The Discovery of the Schöningen spears finally put an end to a long-held research debate that had previously deprived Neanderthals, usually and other human species before Homo sapiens were considered properly equipped to hunt big games. This paradigm shift makes possible a re-evaluation of the socioeconomic, cognitive, and linguistic capabilities of Pleistocene humans, whereby they look much more like modern humans.
With Schöningen, the earliest evidence of complex hunting technologies and activities for Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies is provided. Archaeological reports show that Homo heidelbergensis employed it as an effective hunter in the North Eurasian Plain. Technological know-how in crafting effective hunting weapons and savoir-faire in socially organized hunting behaviors were being passed on sustainably from one generation to the next for the survival of early human beings throughout the Ice Age in Eurasia.
Schöningen represents the world’s most outstandingly preserved evidence of Pleistocene traces in layer after layer of sediment, protecting the history of prehistoric human life around 15 meters thick. Spectacular botanical and faunal finds are also joined by stone, bone, and wood artifacts documenting repetitive forms of subsistence and socio-economic behavior around 300,000 years ago. By far, the highest-resolution insights into this traditional use of natural resources by past hunter-gatherer societies come from many studies on animals and plants used in Schöningen.