The athletes managed to throw their replicas over distances of 65 feet [almost 20 m]. That’s a far cry from modern javelin feats—the world record for men, set in 1996, is 323.1 feet [98.4 m]. But it’s twice what many scientists thought that primitive spears were capable of. It suggests that, contrary to popular belief, early spear-makers—Neanderthals, or perhaps other ancient species like Homo heidelbergensis—could probably have hunted their prey from afar.
But Steve Churchill, an anthropologist from Duke University, notes that the javelin-throwers only hit their target a quarter of the time, and less so at the farthest distances. He’s also unclear as to how many of those “hits” would have been strong enough to, say, penetrate an animal’s hide. In his own experience (and he freely admits that he’s not a trained thrower), Schöningen replicas wobble a lot and tend to strike targets at glancing angles. They might fly far, in other words, but do they fly true? “This is a very good study,” he says, but “I don’t see a lot here to convince me that the Schöningen spears were effective long-range weapons.”
Milks counters that professional javelin-throwers go for distance, and aren’t trained to hit targets. Despite that, some of them clearly got the sense that the heavy spears behave unusually, vibrating along their axis and flexing on impact. The more experienced athletes compensated for this by putting spin on the spears. “That brought home how important it is to use skilled throwers,” Milks says. “What I really want to do now is to go to hunter-forager groups and have them show us what these spears are capable of. They use spears from age 6, which is something I can’t replicate with javelin athletes.”
Spear-throwers and bows may have given their users an edge not because they launched projectiles farther or faster, but because they could be picked up more easily, by more members of a group. As technology, they weren’t inherently superior, just more user-friendly. “That’s an idea that’s worth going forward with,” Milks says.
That's abundantly true of modern technology as well. There's not much social media can do that you can't do with other methods, it's just a hell of a lot easier.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/neanderthal-spears-threw-pretty-well/581218/
"I want to stab that guy, but he's way over there "
ReplyDeleteFascinating.
ReplyDeleteIt's worth putting yourself in the position of someone in that situation doing the hunting, and remember that you don't need an instant kill, hunting and gathering is what you do for a living, you've got all day, and there's probably several of you, so you stick it a couple of times, follow it around and harass it until it bleeds out, or bleeds out enough for another of your buddies to hit it again, and so on. As for range, anything that lets me hurt something far enough away that it, or he can't hurt me is a huge advantage, if it's not going to take him out completely in one shot.
It would also make me feel a lot better to have a spear of some sort to throw at a dangerous animal, be it a hyena or a bull, you wouldn't have to kill such a thing to convince it to go away and leave you alone.
I also imagine that people who did this every day would end up being very good at it compared to people who gave it a shot one afternoon.
phys.org - Neanderthal Lacked Anatomical Competitive Edge: Skeletal Remains Tell the Story
ReplyDeleteJim Slater That's another thing, the biomechanics of throwing seem to have been very different for neanderthals. A good fastball, or accurately thrown rock is perhaps the one thing where homo sapiens really shines brightest in the animal kingdom. (Maybe long term endurance running, but while a few of us are good at that, for part of our lives many of us can throw a rock reasonably well for a much greater portion of our lives. )
ReplyDeleteBut they might have used somewhat different techniques, more sidearm, or underhanded, and they were probably quite a lot stronger in the wrists and arms than you or I.
I'm not attempting to dispute either article based on my complete lack of knowledge, and I didn't intend either comment to be argumentative.
But I think if you'll look you can often see scientists seeking answers to why we (homo sapiens) were the best species, why we won, what superior attributes made ours the species which came out on top, and or absorbed/exterminated the others.
I have a suspicion that what made us come out on top is that we did. The dice came up in our favor because they did. Mostly anyway, people are always seeking "the one true cause" of complex series of events shaped by all sorts of processes and forces.