American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—The oldest known wood spears are actually 100,000 years younger than previously thought, new research reveals. This updated estimate means that Neanderthals – and not their forebears – likely used the spears at what is now the Schöningen 13II-4 archaeological site. Located in modern Germany, Schöningen 13II-4 contains clues about the prehistoric “Spear Horizon,” in which Paleolithic hominins began spear hunting. Prior work first dated the site and its complete wood spears to roughly 400,000 years ago. This meant the spears would have been used by Homo heidelbergensis, likely the last common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals. However, subsequent research moved that estimate up to 300,000 years ago. Now, Jarod Hutson and colleagues have revised this estimate again, establishing the spears as just 200,000 years old. By combining results from amino acid-based geochronology of fossils with reexaminations of local chronostratigraphy from the Mid-Pleistocene, they determined that the site was active during the time of the Neanderthals, who used them for communal hunting. “Schöningen stood as an outlier among sites,” Hutson et al. write. “Our dating evidence for the ‘Spear Horizon’ corrects this mismatch and aligns the Schöningen spears within the timeframe of European Neanderthals and the Middle Paleolithic.”
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Map showing the location of Schöningen (white
dot) relative to the maximum extent of major Middle (Anglian, Elsterian, and Saalian
advances) and Upper (Devensian and Weichselian) Pleistocene inland glacial advances
across northern Europe (100, 101). Map based on SRTM30_PLUS data. Hutson et al., Sci. Adv. 11, eadv0752 (2025)
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Schöningen Spear in situ at excavation site. P. Pfarr NLD, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, Wikimedia Commons
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Schöningen spears. Matthias Vogel, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
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Article Source: AAAS news release
*Revised age for Schöningen hunting spears indicates intensification of Neanderthal cooperative behavior around 200,000 years ago, Science Advances, 9-May-2025. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adv0752
Cove Image, Top Left: P. Pfarr NLD, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, Wikimedia Commons
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