The Schoningen spears
Complete wooden throwing spears survive in a German lignite mine — and their date keeps moving.
- When
- Known to
- ± 20 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
Ten wooden spears and other worked implements were recovered from waterlogged sediments at Schoningen alongside the butchered remains of dozens of horses. They are shaped from spruce with the tip at the base of the trunk where wood is densest, and balanced like a modern javelin. Long dated to around 300,000 years, a 2025 reanalysis argued for roughly 200,000 — which would make them Neanderthal work rather than heidelbergensis. Either way they are the oldest complete hunting weapons known.