Spear and Dart Points

Stone tools were used as the tips on spears or darts. In archaeological terminology, a ‘spear point’ was mounted on a thrusting or hand-thrown weapon, and a ‘dart point’ was mounted on a weapon cast with a spearthrower.

The invention of the spearthrower was an important breakthrough in human evolution, as it allowed prey to be taken down at a distance from the hunter. This, in turn, allowed large animals to be hunted more safely, and it made it easier to capture elusive prey species. It also meant that hunting could be done in more open country, using different tactics, and it likely changed the nature of violence against other people.

The earliest known spears were found at the Schöningen site in Germany, and date to ca. 300,000-340,000 years ago. These are single-piece wooden spears, probably made by Neanderthals or Homo heidelbergensis. Although the spears were made with stone tools—such as flakes, retouched flakes, and core tools—the hominins just sharpened the end of the shaft rather than affixing a stone armature. These spears were probably used for thrusting or throwing, and were not cast with a spearthrower.

The earliest hafted stone points are from the Fauresmith Industry at Kathu Pan in South Africa, dating to ca. 500,000 BP. These points are unmodified or retouched flakes that were made by the Levallois core reduction method. Archaeologists think they are spear points because the damage on them is consistent with abrupt impact. The spear-makers were probably a population of Homo heidelbergensis ancestral to the makers of the Schöningen spears. The earliest direct evidence of Levallois points for hunting comes from a broken point found at the Syrian site of Umm el Tlel embedded in the vertebrae of a wild ass, dating to ca. 50,000 BP. Levallois points may have been made by Neanderthals or other archaic hominins, as well as by early Homo sapiens.

Still Bay points date to ca. 75,000 BP at Blombos Cave in South Africa. In contrast to Levallois points, Still Bay points were made by bifacial reduction of stone that was first improved by heat-treatment, and soft hammers—and the world’s first instance of pressure flaking—were used to shape them. They likely served as spear or dart points, although may have also been used as hafted knives. The complexity of their manufacture, as well as other aspects of assemblages from this period, suggests that they were made by early Homo sapiens. A fragment of a stone point was found embedded in the vertebrae of a extinct buffalo at Klasies River Caves in South Africa, dating to ca. 101,000-85,000 BP. By 65,000 BP, bifacial Still Bay points were replaced by backed microliths as spear or dart armatures at early South African cave sites.

Aterian points from North Africa—Levallois-like flakes with distinctive stems for hafting—may also have been spear or dart points, although careful use-wear analysis suggests that they were usually used as hafted knives or scrapers. Aterian points were used from ca. 150,000-20,000 BP, spanning the invention of the spearthrower.

Intricately-carved spearthrowers have been recovered from cave sites in Europe dating to 17,500-12,500 BP, during the Solutrean and Magdelenian periods. The associated points included backed and unbacked microliths, although bifacial point-like tools—some with carefully-made stems for hafting—are found on Solutrean sites. Archaeologists have identified evidence for high-velocity impact on Uluzzian period microliths dating to 45,000-40,000 BP in Italy, suggesting that spearthrowers may have been invented by then. In Australia, depictions of spear throwers occur in rock art by ca. 15,000 BP, and a skeleton from Lake Mungo dated to ca. 40,000 BP had osteoarthritis in the right elbow that might relate to spearthrower use.

An incredible variety of stone points of all shapes and sizes proliferated during the history of spearthrower-and-dart weapon systems from the Pleistocene, through the Holocene, to the recent past. Innovation was driven by social considerations as much as technical ones as people began using these weapon systems as symbols of cultural identity. Changes in the style of dart points were due shifts in the nature and style of the weapon system more generally, but in most cases only the stone points have preserved in the archaeological record.