Qualla: Schöningen spears

Schöningen spears: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NLD + K. Cornelius, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Wood is the material archaeology almost never gets. It rots, it burns, insects eat it, and a few thousand years is a good run. The standard picture of early human technology is therefore a picture of stone, because stone is what lasted. Then, between 1994 and 1999, archaeologists working ahead of the machines in an open-cast lignite mine at Schöningen lifted ten wooden spears out of a seam of ancient lakebed mud. They were complete, shaped at both ends, and at least two hundred thousand years old.

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Image: NLD + K. Cornelius | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Schöningen spears: Ahead of the Excavators

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P. Pfarr NLD, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The finds came from a layer that archaeologists now simply call the Spear Horizon, part of the site catalogued as Schöningen 13 II-4, excavated under Hartmut Thieme of the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage. It had been a lakeshore. When the Elsterian ice sheet retr...

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Image: P. Pfarr NLD | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Schöningen spears: A Date That Will Not Sit Still

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P. Pfarr NLD, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Everything about Schöningen is settled except when it happened. The first assessment put the spears at 380,000 to 400,000 years old, during Marine Isotope Stage 11, based on their position sandwiched between deposits of the Elsterian and Saalian glaciations in a well-studied sedi...

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Image: P. Pfarr NLD | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Schöningen spears: Made From Slow Wood

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit R59, Public domain. Most of the spears were cut from the trunks of slow-growing spruce; spear IV is pine. The complete examples start at 1.84 metres, with shaft diameters in the low tens of millimetres, and all of them have been squeezed and warped to varying degrees by the sediment that saved them....

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Image: R59 | Public domain

Schöningen spears: Horses, and the Cat on the Shore

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PtrQs, CC BY 4.0. The spears were lying among the bones of Equus mosbachensis, an extinct horse, and many of those bones carry cut marks from butchery. By 2015 the site had produced around 1,500 stone tools and more than 12,000 animal bones. The stone assemblage is all denticulates, retouched flak...

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Image: PtrQs | CC BY 4.0

Schöningen spears: Arguments in the Mud

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Norm Andreiw, CC BY 3.0. Schöningen's interpretation is still contested, which is a sign of how much data it produced. Isotope analysis and wear patterns on the horse teeth at the University of Tübingen show wide variation in diet and habitat, suggesting the bone bed built up through many small events ac...

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Image: Norm Andreiw | CC BY 3.0