When it came to taking down giant animals, prehistoric hunters would have faced a literally mammoth task. Now researchers have shed fresh light on how they could have done it.
Experts study sharp stone points made by the Clovis people, who in the Americas from around 13,000 years ago, says that rather than throwing spears at enormous animals like giant bison, mammoths or ground sloths, the tribes could have planted their weapons point-to-point in the ground to ignite charging creatures.
“We are only now recognizing that people in many cultures have hunted or hunted megafauna with planted pike for thousands of years,” said Dr. Scott Byram of the University of California, Berkley, a co-author of the study.
He added that hunters using pike often encouraged big game to charge at them, and a planted pike could produce far greater force than a hand thrust or thrown spear. “It follows that pike would be preferred over aggressive megafauna,” he said.
Write in the journal Plos One the team notes that while Clovis points are well known, no intact weapons have been found, so exactly how the points were used is unclear.
However, they point out that historical sources – including paintings of boar hunts and descriptions of bear, lion and jaguar hunts – depict people using piercing weapons fixed to the ground when hunting sturdy animals, while that approach was also used for defense against predators and against the charge of war horses in military battles.
To investigate the idea that Clovis people might have used their stone points in a similar way, the team conducted experiments with replicas of what they believed the weapons might have looked like, with the stone point held in place by lashing rings between a wooden post and leg bar.
The team found that a sharp Clovis point could pierce cowhide with relatively light force, but would break if dropped on an oak board with high force (representing an encounter with bone). However, the team found that they could adjust the straps so that they broke apart in the latter scenario, releasing the tip without breaking it, but potentially sinking the pike deeper into an animal.
Byram added that the shape of certain Clovis points would make very effective pike points, and such an application may explain the discovery of complete Clovis points with unbutchered mammoth remains.
The team is now planning experiments involving something similar to a replica mammoth—a block of ballistic gel mounted on a moving object of great mass—to understand how the outcome might change if the impact was not just a force involves what works in a head. -one direction.
Prof Metin Eren at Kent State University’s anthropology department in the US, who was not involved in the work, said it was not the first time archaeologists had suggested a “pike use” for Clovis points.
But he added: “Of course, the big problem is that archaeologists have never discovered any kind of Clovis wooden spear or arrow shaft, much less any hard evidence that spears were actually used in a pike-like way. We really need to make sure that our conclusions does not surpass our experiments, and more importantly, the actual archaeological record.”
