Posted on 01/09/2019 12:41:48 AM PST by SunkenCiv
In the ice age, the inhabitants of today`s Europe were hunting mammoths with javelins. The first direct evidence of this is a fragment of a 25,000 years old flint head discovered in Kraków, stuck in a mammoth rib... archaeologists have discovered the remains of at least 110 mammoths from approx. 25,000 years ago.
"Among tens of thousands of bones, during a detailed analysis of the remains, I came across a damaged mammoth rib. It turned out that a fragment of a flint arrowhead was stuck in it. This is the first such find from the Ice Age in Europe!" - told PAP Dr. Piotr Wojtal from the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals PAS in Kraków...
Wojtal reminds that the scientific community has been discussing for years how our ancestors killed mammoths. According to some researchers, these animals were killed by trickery - chasing them to the pits or towards bluffs, from which they would fall. Others say that people focused on weaker or sick animals. Some think that mammoths were hunted.
"We finally have a +smoking gun+, the first direct evidence of how these animals were hunted" - notes the archaeozoologist.
So far, similar finds are known only from two Siberian sites.
The bone with the flint blade was discovered already in 2002. Since bone damage is small, it was only discovered in February 2018 during detailed archaeozoological analyses. During this research, each of tens of thousands of bone fragments is carefully inspected.
The blade fragment preserved in the bone is only 7 mm long. Scientists believe that it is a flint tip broken off at the moment of driving a spear into the body of a mammoth.
(Excerpt) Read more at scienceinpoland.pap.pl ...
Did the Time-Life book (which is hardly a textbook) cite any finds? Yeah, I didn't think so. Stop posting boilerplate BS.
There are radiometric dating methods that work on various minerals, but they are not radiocarbon. Radiocarbon dating of the bone can show the date of the critter, and if done with the bone around the flint tip can give the date of the critter's death or at least its injury.
Definitely, not so long ago. On a couple of islands (California Channel islands, and Wrangel off Siberia) dwarfed versions survived until after the construction of Egypt's Great Pyramid.
BOILER PLATE? Get your copy here! Settled Science! It even shows how they chipped flint!
https://www.amazon.com/Early-man-Life-nature-library/dp/B0007DN27I
That's an old find, and though it is just some spears, one could infer that they were used for hunting..
Wow, AMC was around a lot longer than I thought...
Here is a couple of other links to older hunting sites you might also consider BOILER PLATE.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/nov/15/stone-spear-early-human-species
https://www.thoughtco.com/torralba-ambrona-lower-paleolithic-sites-173020
Thanks, SunkenCiv.
Thanks.
Seems pretty desperate to me, shooting a mammoth with a stone-tipped arrow. Maybe they were just trying to chase it off a cliff.
“400,000 year old spears found in an German coal mine!”
Yeah, been trying to wrap my alleged mind around that one for a while.
I wonder exactly which of our ancestors used those.
Even worse... That was before bows and arrows. It would have been hafted on a thrusting spear so they had to get close to these huge animals to even use it. Honestly... As dangerous as it was to procure sustenance, it’s a wonder man even still exists as a species.
“That was before bows and arrows.”
I really wonder about that. I’ve seen three and four year old children make bows and arrows out of household detritus. It’s hard to believe that no one figured it out back when it was so important.
Wrong sized game. Mammoths would have just shaken off arrows, it would have taken a hundred. It would require the deeper thrusting spear to make lethal wounds in a mammoth.
After the larger animals like sloths and mammoths were gone, spears became smaller so that they could be thrown instead of thrusted at smaller faster game. Then the Atlatl came along so the smaller spears could be thrown faster and further. Then finally along came the bows and arrows much much later.
Sometimes passed down traditional methods are hard to override with newer innovation so it is a long slow process. We can look around us today and see many cases of this very same thing still holding us back from certain new innovations. :)
It’s human nature to resist change...
IOW, you continue to lie -- there's no "settled science" and "heretic" talk in that book. Hit the bricks, troll.
***there’s no “settled science” and “heretic” talk in that book.**
Then every thing we were ordered to believe back then is a lie, same as for today, same for the future. I still remember when the Piltdown Man was considered the “missing link”
As for heretic talk, the book opens with the difference between “scientific” Uniformism and religious Catastrophism.
Today, scientific Catastrophism is in style.
What will be the “IN” teachings of a hundred years form now?
I still remember when the Piltdown Man was considered the “missing link”.
Then you must have a good memory for someone your age, because it was identified as a fake in 1923.
Just knock it off, liar.
#31 There are many a hunter who were smooshed under a Mammoth foot
“It’s human nature to resist change.”
Yeah, but every now and again there’s a maverick.
It could have happened that way, but I hate to think people took that long to invent the bow.
“#31 There are many a hunter who were smooshed under a Mammoth foot”
I read an article a while back that reported a comparison of the injuries to ancient hunter skeletons with later people. They said that the closest match was rodeo cowboys.
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