4 wk. ago • 98%

Instead of Thrown, Spears Were Planted in the Ground to Kill a Charging Mammoth

www.discovermagazine.com Instead of Thrown, Spears Were Planted in the Ground to Kill a Charging Mammoth

Researchers recreate Ice Age hunting techniques to show that spears were probably braced against the ground rather than thrown at massive mammoths.

67 comments

i remember reading how eskimos would wrap sharp bone fragments in balls of fat and leave them for polar bears.. then they would follow the bears until they died of internal bleeding.

elephants are much smarter than bears though.

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- Brutal
  
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  I mean, we wiped out mastodons completely: Humans can be like that sometimes.
  
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- Isnt there a similar thing where they put a blood soaked knife in the snow blade up and a wild wolf will come and lick the blood off, cutting their tongue on the blade and keep lapping at it not realising its their blood until they pass out.
  
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  That reminds me of how when there is a mosquito in your arm you can pinch the skin around it, trapping its sucker in your skin and at the same time violently blasting your blood into the mosquito until it's too fat to fly.
  
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- Elephants (and mammoths probably) are also herbivores that chew their food. Sometimes that food is a whole tree. Using the polar bear sharp bone strategy would be like feeding a razor blade to a wood chipper.
  
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- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJktslo1P2w
  
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- that is such a grimy way to hunt lol. basically poisoning without the risk eating the meat
  
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  It’s the arctic and a polar bear. Is it fair? Well it’s about as fair as fishing. And if they don’t do either they’ll see how fair starving on a block of ice is
  
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Pikes were used much the same way right? Surprised I never put the two together, ancient humans weren't stupid so of course they'd realize that was a better way of causing harm than just throwing it. Not to mention their use of leverage in weapons like the Atlatl. No clue on the timespan of these things but I do find this stuff interesting.

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- I'm sure so much of our history is more or less completely unknowable simply because the remains all degraded quickly.
  
  How many things made out of wood that simply rotted away, or burned or any one of a thousand things.
  
  Stone tools were a game changer in every sense.
  
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  I would posit string being the real game changer. How do you think they got the stone on the end of a stick?
  
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- The Clovis period was around 12,000 years ago in North America.
  
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Makes sense, use the prey's weight and momentum to do the hard work, rather than the relativly feable arm of a much smaller creature!

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- Many people have a silly idea in their heads that stone-age humans could not be as innovative and smart as we can because their technology was less advanced than ours.
  
  They also look at an expertly-knapped spearhead like the ones in the thumbnail and think they could do that with a couple of rocks they find in their backyard.
  
  These ancestors of ours were smart, they were creative thinkers, they made stone tools at an expert level that the average person today could not even hope to replicate. I love finding out new ways they were able to innovate.
  
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  Modern society has existed in a flash on an evolutionary timescale, it’s likely that our ancient ancestors were exactly as “smart” as we are
  
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  To be fair I can't fathom the size of balls you need to have, to stand behind a spear while a Mammoth is charging you down.
  
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The grooves carved into each point could allow it to slide down the shaft upon impact. A fixed point, by contrast, would be more likely to shatter when it hit dense material, especially bone.

This is really interesting. And to further illustrate just how much we have no idea and might be wildly wrong, there's an incredible book, All Yesterdays, which reimagines prehistoric animals in interesting new ways. The second half of the book shows possible recreations of contemporary animals based solely on their skeletons to really drive home the point at how much guessing is involved in this field. Some of the images can be found here.

This is a rhino skeleton (wtf):

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- We do know a lot more about mammoths though, because they have been found frozen in good condition in Siberia.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuka_(mammoth)
  
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  There were some cave lions found several years ago, too. Cubs.
  
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Fuckin bullshit. I’ve seen the cave paintings - they were throwing those fuckers

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- How do you think they got the mammoth to run into the trap of spears? Also, in case it turned towards you, you'd want a spear in your hands to make him turn.
  
  Edit: judging by the picture in the post, if you couldn't run away, you might jam the back end into the ground beside/behind yourself and hold up the point so at least he'd be wounded when he squashed you
  
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  You're all wrong. It was a, "Mr. Mastodon, you dropped your spears!" situation.
  
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- As far as I know, the Clovis people did not make cave paintings and the people who did make cave paintings didn't hunt mammoths.
  
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  Reallllyyy. That's pretty interesting.
  
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  Is this the Mandela effect here? Are not all of the cave paintings and cave drawings I've ever seen ones of cave peoples throwing spears at wooly mammoths? Have we been Swiftboated by cave people? Stolen cave valor?
  
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Could you just imagine killing an animal that size with a big stick? I'd tell everyone I met, probably multiple times.

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- Everyone you'd met was probably with you at the time. So their response would be, "yeah we know. Shut up about that mammoth already. It's been two weeks and we have to go kill another mammoth."
  
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- So if the theory is that spears were planted in the ground rather than thrown, that means there was probably a ton of them in the ground and mammoths were chased into the trap.
  
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  Planted in the ground could mean that they were left free standing or that they held the backend against the ground whilst holding onto it still.
  
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I always pictured mammoths being more docile: disinclined to charge. Didn't realize they could be more of a wooly bully.

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- Elephants charge pretty easily, so that part doesn't surprise me.
  
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  I did that thing where I lied on the internet. The preamble was there purely as a setup for the greatest joke of all time.
  
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  Yeah, if your main form of offense/defense is that you are: large, and have massive fuck-off tusks on your front then charging seems to be a pretty good go to.
  
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- Wooly bully?
  
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  Watch it now, watch it!
  
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Prehistoric lego.

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I would be surprised if they didn't use pitfall traps with spikes. That's how I would take down an elephant

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- I believe that's a tiger trap
  
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  I believe you are correct
  
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Isnt this how you would hunt boar too?

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- This is probably how you hunt nearly everything which is faster than you as long as you don't have the means to kill it with one shot.
  
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  You might be right, but i think it also has to do with the charging behavior of those animals. The plant a spear strat seems less effective if your prey is better able to change directions.
  
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Prehistoric Minecraft Automatic Mob Farm.

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It was the first Olympic sport...run from.the Mammoth

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Well yes, obviously.

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