The Schöningen site, in the hilly landscape of the northern European Plains, has dramatically changed our view of early human military capabilities. Excavation at this former open-cast mine, which started in 1981, unearthed several Middle Pleistocene sites and represented the oldest known wooden tools of humankind. Of these finds, the ten spears and two double-pointed sticks or throwing sticks of Schöningen 13 II-4 are leading to a complete revision of the hunter vs. scavenger debate.
Schöningen 13 II-4 dates to the MIS 9 period and is situated at a former interglacial lakeshore that dates between 337 and 300 thousand years ago. The exceptional conditions of preservation at this site allowed for the survival of hundreds of natural and worked wood remains, making this site the best for the study of early wooden artifacts and human behavior associated with woodworking. These early wooden hunting tools have provided insights into early human hunting abilities, social interaction, and hominin cognition unparalleled to date.
The earliest indirect evidence of human woodworking comes from use-wear on lithics dated to between 2 and 1.5 million years ago. Direct evidence of wood artifacts from Africa and the Middle East dates as far back as 780 thousand years ago. The Schöningen spears represent the earliest European wooden spears, dating to between 400 and 120 thousand years ago. These have revolutionized our understanding of early human hunting strategies by showing that they could actively hunt large game prowess previously only attributed to modern humans.
The discovery of the site at Schöningen, a site that lies close to the town of Schöningen in Lower Saxony, Germany, was made in 1992 as a result of rescue excavations due to lignite open cast mining. Systematic excavations were first done by the Lower Saxony State Office of Cultural Heritage (NLD) and, since 2008, in cooperation with Eberhard Karls University Tübingen and Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (SHEP). Mining activities stopped in the year 2016, yet the site gave or still gives vital information concerning early human life.
The Schöningen spears, nine in number, two throwing sticks, and one lance represent exceptionally important documents of early human active hunting ability. These arms demonstrate coordinated social acting and associated planning abilities, capacities so far attributed to modern humans only. The findings have fundamentally changed our view of the Pleistocene human species regarding socio-cultural abilities, human cognition, and technological expertise.
It was in this sense that the Schöningen hunting weapons were part of a technological ensemble, the origin of which had already seen Homo heidelbergensis established in Europe and Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens) developing anatomically. The spread of effective hunting technologies across human species and population boundaries underpinned the successful expansion of various human species at different times during the Pleistocene. Schöningen is outstandingly a case of this technological and social exchange.
The finding of the Schöningen spears marked the end of this long-standing debate, where it was denied to Neanderthals and to any other human species before Homo sapiens that they could actively hunt large game, considering them pure scavengers. This paradigm shift is known as the Schöningen effect and opened the doors to a reinterpretation of socio-cognitive, linguistic, and technological abilities of Pleistocene humans toward the modern human paradigm.
Schöningen has provided the oldest evidence of complex hunting technologies and behavior in Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies. The archaeological record at the site suggests that Homo heidelbergensis was an effective hunter on the North Eurasian Plain. This technological know-how in manufacturing efficient hunting weapons and knowledge of socially organized hunting behavior could be sustainably passed on to subsequent generations. This might have even been the case in knowledge transfer between human species for both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens alike.
In conclusion, the Schöningen site represents exceptional evidence of traditional land use by past human societies and features an outstanding value for landscape archaeology. The extraordinary botanical and faunal evidence speaks, in concert with the stone, bone, and wood artifacts, to repetitive patterns of subsistence and socio-economic behavior some 300,000 years ago and provides a unique glimpse into the lifeways of early human hunter-gatherer societies.