Schöningen Spears: The Oldest Complete Hunting Weapons

The Schöningen spears are a set of wooden hunting spears found between 1994 and 1998 in an open-cast lignite mine at Schöningen in Lower Saxony, Germany. Usually dated to around 300,000 years ago, they are the oldest complete hunting weapons known. Found among the butchered remains of more than twenty horses, they showed that early humans in Europe were skilled hunters who planned their kills.

Background: hunters or scavengers?

Wood rarely survives for hundreds of thousands of years, so most of what is known about early human technology comes from stone tools. For much of the twentieth century this created a lopsided picture. Some archaeologists argued that Lower Palaeolithic humans, before the Neanderthals, had no effective weapons and obtained meat mainly by scavenging carcasses left by large carnivores.

A few earlier finds hinted otherwise. The tip of a wooden spear or stake found at Clacton-on-Sea in Essex in 1911 is about 400,000 years old. A complete yew spear found at Lehringen in Lower Saxony in 1948 lay among the bones of a forest elephant, but it is much younger, at about 120,000 years old. Neither was enough to settle the debate.

The discovery

Schöningen lies near the former inner-German border, east of Braunschweig. From the early 1980s the archaeologist Hartmut Thieme of the Lower Saxony State Office for Heritage led surveys of the open-cast mine ahead of the giant excavators, recording sites in the layers above the brown coal.

In 1994, at a site designated Schöningen 13 II-4, his team began to find worked wood in waterlogged lake-shore sediments. Over the following years they uncovered several complete or nearly complete spears, as well as a short double-pointed stick that may have been a throwing stick. The layer became known as the Speerhorizont, or “Spear Horizon”. Thieme announced the finds in the journal Nature in February 1997.

The waterlogged, oxygen-poor mud had preserved the wood remarkably well. The same layer also contained stone tools, flakes from resharpening, and many thousands of animal bones.

The spears and how they were made

The main group consists of about ten spears and spear fragments, of which several are complete. They range from about 1.8 to 2.5 metres long. Most were made from young spruce trunks that had grown slowly in a cold climate, producing dense, strong wood; at least one was made from pine.

The makers chose carefully. They felled thin trees, removed the bark and side branches, and shaped the point from the base of the trunk, where the wood is hardest. The thickest and heaviest part of each spear lies in the front third, much like a modern competition javelin. Thieme argued that this balance showed they were designed to be thrown.

Analyses in recent years have found traces of the work involved in making the spears, including scraping and smoothing marks on the surfaces. Researchers have also recovered many other worked wooden objects from the site, suggesting that wood was an important material for these people.

Horse hunting by a lake

The Spear Horizon contained the remains of at least 20 to 25 horses, belonging to an extinct form often called Equus mosbachensis. Many of the bones bear cut marks from stone tools and fractures from marrow extraction. The site seems to record repeated butchery of horses on the shore of a shallow lake.

Thieme interpreted the site as a place where a group of hunters had ambushed a herd of horses, perhaps in a single autumn hunt. Later work by teams led by Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen and Jordi Serangeli has suggested a more complex picture, with the lakeshore used repeatedly over a longer period. Either way, the combination of weapons and butchered horses points clearly to active hunting.

Other finds at Schöningen include remains of elephants, aurochs and bison, and bones of a sabre-toothed cat (Homotherium), reported in 2015, which show that early humans shared the landscape with dangerous predators.

Thrown or thrust?

Whether the spears were thrown or used to stab at close range has been debated. Some researchers argued that throwing weapons required abilities not yet present in these humans. In 2019 a study led by Annemieke Milks asked trained javelin athletes to throw replicas of the Schöningen spears. They hit targets at distances of up to about 20 metres with enough force to kill an animal.

Most specialists now accept that the spears could have been used in either way, depending on the situation. What is clear is that they were deliberately designed, and that making them required planning, knowledge of different woods and several stages of work.

The dating debate

The age of the spears has been revised more than once. Thieme originally estimated about 400,000 years, based on the position of the layer in the sequence of ice ages. In 2015 Daniel Richter and Matthias Krbetschek published thermoluminescence dates on heated flints that placed the occupation at about 337,000 to 300,000 years ago. This became the most widely quoted figure.

In 2025 a study using amino acid dating of shells and bone, combined with a new analysis of the layers, argued that the Spear Horizon formed during a warm period around 200,000 years ago. Other researchers have questioned this younger age. For now, the spears are best described as between about 300,000 and 200,000 years old, with the older estimate still widely used.

The date matters for identifying the makers. No human bones have been found at Schöningen. At around 300,000 years, the spears are usually attributed to Homo heidelbergensis or to early members of the Neanderthal lineage. A younger date would point more firmly to early Neanderthals.

Conservation and legacy

Keeping the spears intact has been a challenge. Wood that has lain in wet sediment for hundreds of thousands of years is soft and fragile, and it can shrink and crack if it dries out. After excavation the spears were kept in carefully controlled conditions and later conserved for display.

In 2013 a research and visitor centre called the Paläon opened next to the mine, and it is now known as the Forschungsmuseum Schöningen. It displays the spears and supports continuing excavations, which are still uncovering animal bones, stone tools and worked wood from the old lake shores. Mining at Schöningen ended in 2016, but archaeologists have continued to study the exposed layers.

The spears have become standard evidence in debates about early human hunting, cooperation and planning. They are regularly compared with much younger wooden objects, such as the Neanderthal spear from Lehringen and digging sticks from Italian sites, to trace how early humans used wood over time.

Timeline

• c. 400,000 years ago: The Clacton spear tip is made in what is now Essex, England.
• c. 300,000 to 200,000 years ago: Hominins hunt horses and leave spears on a lakeshore at Schöningen.
• c. 120,000 years ago: The Lehringen yew spear is left with an elephant skeleton in Lower Saxony.
• Early 1980s: Hartmut Thieme begins archaeological surveys in the Schöningen mine.
• 1994: The first spears are found at Schöningen 13 II-4.
• 1997: Thieme publishes the spears in Nature.
• 2013: The Paläon research and experience centre, now the Forschungsmuseum Schöningen, opens beside the mine.
• 2015: Luminescence dating places the site at about 337,000 to 300,000 years ago.

Why it matters

The Schöningen spears transformed ideas about early human behaviour. They show that, long before modern humans reached Europe, hominins chose and shaped wood with care, made balanced weapons and cooperated to hunt large, fast animals. Alongside stone tools such as Acheulean hand axes, they reveal a technology far richer than stone alone can show.