When Did Humans Begin Hurling Spears?

[Double Naught Spy]

So does it strike anybody as odd that for a study purported to be distinguishing the difference between thrusting and hurling of stone tipped spears at game that no experiments were actually done with thrusting?

Note in the description that the tests were done by O'Driscoll with hurling ONLY and compared against butchery marks. Differences were found between hurling impact damage on bone and butchering damage on bone. Even bits of stone were found in the damage of some of the impacts. Cool. However, this completely fails to distinguish between thrusting and hurling. It only distinguishes between impact damage and butchering damage.

The study is still neat, but not for the reasons claimed.

 

[craftsman]

I'll go with pre Homo Heidelbergensis. The reason for that, look at Chimps (Pan Troglodytes) - they intentionally break branches and use them as stabbing spears. They split off the "family tree" about 4 million years ago. It would not take long to determine that one can safely throw that broken branch. Fire-hardening comes several millions of years later (gotta master fire first), and stone points not too far (10s of thousands of years) after that.

Now, if you're a Darwinian, that's all fine - me? I like the "This is an alien penal colony planet, like the state of Georgia was for the Brits" theory. it explains a lot more (30,000 plus year old 100 ton, laser cut stonework in the Andes; pyramids and henges around the globe aligned with ley lines, etc.) LOL!

 

[hso]

Double Naught,

They have the thrusting vs. butchering already to compare to the new projectile "data".

 

[Double Naught Spy]

Sorry, didn't see that in the summary article or the abstract. You have a link to where this comparison was done? Otherwise, all is see is basically this...

He found "quite a difference between the butchering marks and projectile impact marks," he says.

cited from the OP's link.

The article claims they made a determination, but the leaves out have of the information that would be necessary to support the claim. Nowhere was it stated that they even looked at thrusting or thrusting data, but did look at butchering and hurling data. See my point? It appears they are saying that butchering leaves no stone bits behind in the striae, but a hurled spear can...and that is where they leave it. So a piece of bone with a stone bit in the damage stria is hurling. So I am confused by how this paper made such a determination for thrusting.

I didn't attend the SAAs this year as they were in Hawaii and I am now retired, so I missed the opportunity to see the presentation. I have spent time with a lot of the New World literature on cut mark evidence and am not familiar with thrusting v. butchery research, but maybe I missed it especially if it was "buried" in the lithic literature and not the zooarch literature. If Old World, then I definitely missed it as I don't spend time with that literature.

So whatever help you would offer would be great.

 

[Coop45]

Old Fluff's first job was "spear retriever" for Alley Oop!