ArticleScientific reports2019
External ballistics of Pleistocene hand-thrown spears: experimental performance data and implications for human evolution.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mechanical limits shape the eccentric form of rose prickles.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2026Article
- Late Pleistocene Clovis atlatl hunting fails a chronological modeling test.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Assessing geometric microliths as cultural markers through an analysis of shape variation and projectile performance.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The wooden artifacts from Schöningen's Spear Horizon and their place in human evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- First direct evidence of lion hunting and the early use of a lion pelt by Neanderthals.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Atlatl use equalizes female and male projectile weapon velocity.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The Use of Wooden Clubs and Throwing Sticks among Recent Foragers : Cross-Cultural Survey and Implications for Research on Prehistoric Weaponry.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- A double-pointed wooden throwing stick from Schöningen, Germany: Results and new insights from a multianalytical study.PloS one · 2023Article
- Costly teaching contributes to the acquisition of spear hunting skill among BaYaka forager adolescents.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Observational
- Causal Reasoning and Event Cognition as Evolutionary Determinants of Language Structure.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- The Creative Neurons.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Article
- Human athletic paleobiology; using sport as a model to investigate human evolutionary adaptation.American journal of physical anthropology · 2020Review
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The appearance of weaponry - technology designed to kill - is a critical but poorly established threshold in human evolution. It is an important behavioural marker representing evolutionary changes in ecology, cognition, language and social behaviours. While the earliest weapons are often considered to be hand-held and consequently short-ranged, the subsequent appearance of distance weapons is a crucial development. Projectiles are seen as an improvement over contact weapons, and are considered by some to have originated only with our own species in the Middle Stone Age and Upper Palaeolithic. Despite the importance of distance weapons in the emergence of full behavioral modernity, systematic experimentation using trained throwers to evaluate the ballistics of thrown spears during flight and at impact is lacking. This paper addresses this by presenting results from a trial of trained javelin athletes, providing new estimates for key performance parameters. Overlaps in distances and impact energies between hand-thrown spears and spearthrowers are evidenced, and skill emerges as a significant factor in successful use. The results show that distance hunting was likely within the repertoire of hunting strategies of Neanderthals, and the resulting behavioural flexibility closely mirrors that of our own species.
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