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Lower Palaeolithic throwing spears

By Hartmut Thieme: "Since 1983 the Institut für Denkmalpflege, Hannover, has led long-term archaeological excavations under the direction of the author in the area of the Schoeningen (Schöningen) brown-coal mine. An area in excess of 350,000 sq. m has been excavated in the c. 6 sq. km of the mine complex. During the course of the mining operation and excavation of Holocene sites from the Neolithic to Iron Age, the Pleistocene exposures were constantly monitored and analysed by geological and environmental specialists"...LINK

Hunting for the first humans in Britain

When did humans first come to Britain? And how did they survive? Nick Ashton reports on our first half million years...LINK

700,000 year-old handaxe found in Britain

From Stone Pages: A man walking his dog along the coast of Norfolk, England, has found a stone axe which could change the human history of Europe by 200,000 years. Mike Chambers has been beachcombing for 10 years, and found the axe in clay below a cliff at low tide while walking between Yarmouth and Cromer. Experts are trying to confirm the age of the axe by examining the strata of the cliff. It is believed it was used for butchering large animals such as rhinoceros or lions. Approximately the size of a fist, it was worked to a point which is still sharp, having been protected by the clay...LINK

The nature of Lower Palaeolithic social and economic organisation

A student essay by James Bonsall:
We have no direct evidence concerning human behaviour during the Lower Palaeolithic. No written records exist. Instead, we have to model and infer certain assumptions according to the evidence we do have. This essay will examine the ways in which prehistoric sites have been interpreted for clues as to the social and economic organisation of the European Lower Palaeolithic, by discussing four themes: evidence for settlement, hunting, technology, and possible trading links...LINK

The Prehistory Museum of Terra Amata, Nice

Website...LINK

The Elephants of Terra Amata

P. Valensi: The Elephants of Terra Amata open air site (Lower Paleolithic, France):
The site of Terra Amata has yielded several remains of Elephas antiquus in the different anthropic occupation levels. The preservation is not good and doesn't allow to do a morphological study of the remains. The population of Elephas is presented in its archaeological context and the principal taphonomic observations are discussed...LINK (pdf)

The return of man the hunter

Henry Gee: – "The old concept of Stone-Age Man as a proficient big-game hunter has come in for a lot of criticism in recent years. Patient re-examination of supposed ancient kill sites, comparative studies of modern hunter-gatherer peoples (and, it must be said, a certain amount of political correctness) has turned macho and musclebound Palaeolithic hunters into sorry scavengers of everyone else's left-overs.

This could all change with a truly astonishing archaeological find from Germany, reported in the 27 February 1997 Nature. Dr Hartmut Thieme describes three wooden spears recovered from a lignite mine at Schöningen, about 100 km east of Hannover. The spears are each carefully carved from a single trunk of spruce, about two metres long, shaped and balanced for throwing in the manner of modern javelins, and 400,000 years old. This makes them the oldest wooden hunting weapons ever found. "Wooden finds like these would be sensational if only 3000 years old; ones a hundred times older are almost unimaginable" says Professor Robin Dennell of the University of Sheffield... LINK

Early human occupation of Western Europe

Abstract: The lacustrine deposits infilling the intramontane Guadix-Baza Basin, in the Betic Range of Southern Spain, have yielded abundant well-preserved lithic artifacts. In addition, the lake beds contain a wide range of micromammals including Mimomys savini and Allophaiomys burgondiae and large mammals such as Mammuthus and Hippopotamus together with the African saber-toothed felid Megantereon. The association of the lithic artifacts along with the fossil assemblages, themselves of prime significance in the Eurasian mammal biochronology, is providing new insight into the controversy of the human settlement in Southern Europe. Despite the importance of the artifacts and fossil assemblage, estimates of the geological age of the site are still in conflict. Some attempts at dating the sediments have included biochronology, uranium series, amino acid racemization, and stratigraphic correlation with other well-dated sections in the basin, but so far have failed to yield unambiguous ages. Here we present paleomagnetic age dating at the relevant localities and thus provide useful age constraints for this critical paleoanthropological and mammal site. Our data provide firm evidence for human occupation in Southern Europe in the Lower Pleistocene, around 1 mega-annum ago. The current view of when and how hominids first dispersed into Europe needs to be reevaluated...LINK

Grass stalks fit bill for earliest toothpicks

Even early humans knew a thing or two about dental hygiene. Our ancestors used grass stalks as tooth picks, experimental findings suggest...Link (New Scientist)

Stone tool, bone find earliest ever excavated

It was an anthropologist's dream come true. Three years ago, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Michael Rogers was in Gona, Ethiopia, working on a paleoanthropological research project in an area that hadn't been looked at before. He found a few flakes--tools that are pieces of stone chipped off of a larger stone--and began digging with a crew of experienced excavators. What they eventually discovered is an exciting development in the field of paleo- anthropology: the earliest stone tools and animal bones at the same site, clearly associated with each other, indicating early humans' use of tools to provide food for themselves...

Link/Source: Southern Connecticut State University, October 2003

The Humans of Gran Dolina

Around 800,000 years ago, a group of early humans took shelter in a cave at the site now called Gran Dolina (Atapuerca, Spain). Researchers have unearthed an intriguing collection of hominid fossils buried inside the filled-in cave that are unlike any other fossils found in Africa, Asia or Europe. As a result, these hominids have been classified as a new species, Homo antecessor, from the Latin word for explorer. Homo antecessor may have been the first hominid to populate western Europe...Link

2.6 MYA Site Found

On a hillside in the badlands of Ethiopia, an ancestral home of the human family, an international team of scientists has uncovered the earliest known stone tools to be found mixed with fragments of fossilized animal bones. The scientists think the material, almost 2.6 million years old, is the strongest evidence yet that the primal technology was used to butcher animal carcasses for meat and marrow...Link

World's Oldest Stone Tools

More than 2,600 sharp-edged flakes, flake fragments, and cores (cobbles from which flakes have been removed), found in the fine-grained sediments of a dry riverbed in the Afar region of Ethiopia, have been dated to between 2.52 and 2.60 million years ago, pushing back by more than 150,000 years the known date at which humans were making stone tools...Link

A Lower Palaeolithic site in Italy

It was May 1979, when a photographer, Alberto Solinas, vacationing in the Molise area, accidentally discovered alongside the site of the new super-highway Napoli-Vasto under construction and very close to downtown Isernia, what has been claimed one of Europe's most important palaeo-anthropological discoveries...Link

Lower Palaeolithic quarry site in India

Cambridge University's Michael Petraglia is excavating a limestone quarry in the southwest Indian state of Karnataka that has given up stone tools of the Acheulean type. This technology is over 1.7 million years old and typically features hand axes and cleavers...Link

Schöningen: World's oldest spears

The city of Schoeningen, Lower Saxony/Germany, boasts of being one of the most important archaeological find spots in the world. A 400,000-year-old Lower Palaeolithic hunting station of Homo erectus has produced not only thousands of well-preserved mammal remains, most of them from horses (19 complete skulls), but also eight wooden spears - so far the oldest hunting weapons of mankind! They indicate that early man even in this evolutionary stage was a specialized and experienced hunter...Link

Meat eating is an old human habit

Humans evolved beyond their vegetarian roots and became meat-eaters at the dawn of the genus Homo, around 2.5 million years ago, according to a study of our ancestors' teeth.

In 1999, researchers found cut marks on animal bones dated at around 2.5 million years old. But no one could be sure that they were made by meat-eating hominids, because none appeared to have suitable teeth.

Now an analysis by Peter Ungar of the University of Arkansas has revealed that the first members of Homo had much sharper teeth than their most likely immediate ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis, the species that produced the famous fossil Lucy...

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Atapuerca, a Lower Palaeolithic world heritage site

In a small hill east of Burgos, evidence of the presence and lifeways of prehistoric humanity is preserved, spanning the time from one million years ago to the present...

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Palaeolithic foot prints

Three primitive humans who scrambled down an Italian volcano more than 325,000 years ago left their mark...

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