Prehistoric hunters faced a truly mammoth task when it came to bringing down giant animals. Now researchers have shed new light on how it might have done it.
Experts who have studied the sharp stone points of the Clovis people, who lived in America about 13,000 years ago, say that instead of throwing spears at massive animals like giant bison, mammoths or ground sloths, the tribes may have planted their weapon tips. Above ground to blink charging creatures.
“We’re just now recognizing that people in many different cultures have hunted or defended against megafauna with planted pikes for thousands of years,” said study co-author Dr. Scott Byrum of the University of California, Berkeley.
He said hunters using bikes often encourage big game to charge at them, and a planted bike can generate more power than a hand thrust or thrown spear. “It follows that pikes would have been favored against invasive megafauna,” he said.
Writing in Plos One magazine Although Clovis points are well known, no weapons of any kind have been found, so it is not clear how the points were used, the team notes.
However, historical sources—including paintings of boar hunts and descriptions of bear, lion, and jaguar hunts—depict the use of ground-piercing weapons when hunting heavier animals, while the approach was also used to defend against predators. Against mounting war horses in military battles.
To explore the idea that the Clovis people might have used their stone points in a similar way, the team conducted experiments using replicas of what they believed the weapons would have looked like, with a stone point lashed between a wooden pole and a bone bar.
The team found that a sharp Clovis point could pierce cowhide with relatively light force, but that it would break if left point-down on an oak board at high force (representing contact with bone). However, the team found that they could adjust the lashes so that in the latter situation these would break, releasing the point without breaking, but allowing the pike to sink deeper into an animal.
Byram said the shape of some Clovis points would have made very useful pike tips, and such a use could explain the discovery of complete Clovis points with unbutchered mammoth remains.
The team now plans experiments involving something like a large mammoth — a ballistics gel embedded in a moving object with a large mass — to understand how the effect would change if the impact did not involve just the force acting on the head. – One direction.
Medin Eren, a professor of anthropology at Kent State University in the US who was not involved in the work, said this is not the first time archaeologists have proposed a “bike use” for Clovis points.
But he added: “The main problem, of course, is that archaeologists have not found any Clovis wooden spears or dart shafts, and there is no hard evidence that spears were actually used in a pike-like fashion. We need to ensure that our results do not exceed our experiments and, more importantly, the actual archaeological record.”
