20
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      External ballistics of Pleistocene hand-thrown spears: experimental performance data and implications for human evolution

      research-article
      1 , , 2 , 1
      Scientific Reports
      Nature Publishing Group UK

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          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.

          Related collections

          Most cited references58

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          The origins of lithic projectile point technology: evidence from Africa, the Levant, and Europe

          John Shea (2006)
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Getting to the point: Evolutionary change in prehistoric weaponry

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Elastic energy storage in the shoulder and the evolution of high-speed throwing in Homo

              Although some primates, including chimpanzees, throw objects occasionally 1,2 , only humans regularly throw projectiles with high speed and great accuracy. Darwin noted that humans’ unique throwing abilities, made possible when bipedalism emancipated the arms, enabled foragers to effectively hunt using projectiles 3 . However, there has been little consideration of the evolution of throwing in the years since Darwin made his observations, in part because of a lack of evidence on when, how, and why hominins evolved the ability to generate high-speed throws 4-8 . Here, we show using experimental studies of throwers that human throwing capabilities largely result from several derived anatomical features that enable elastic energy storage and release at the shoulder. These features first appear together approximately two million years ago in the species Homo erectus. Given archaeological evidence that suggests hunting activity intensified around this time 9 , we conclude that selection for throwing in order to hunt likely played an important role in the evolution of the human genus.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                a.milks@ucl.ac.uk
                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group UK (London )
                2045-2322
                25 January 2019
                25 January 2019
                2019
                : 9
                : 820
                Affiliations
                [1 ]ISNI 0000000121901201, GRID grid.83440.3b, Institute of Archaeology, University College London, ; 31-34 Gordon Square, London, WC1H OPY UK
                [2 ]Nordic Sport (UK) Limited, 21 Bentley Road, Castle Donington, Derby, DE74 2UL UK
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0779-6200
                Article
                37904
                10.1038/s41598-018-37904-w
                6347593
                30683877
                8d86ac0c-2c69-4d95-926d-0fce0081cb41
                © The Author(s) 2019

                Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 5 July 2018
                : 15 December 2018
                Funding
                Funded by: FundRef https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000267, RCUK | Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC);
                Award ID: 817687
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: UCL Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects 504255
                Categories
                Article
                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2019

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

                Comments

                Comment on this article