Prehistoric humans may have stuck spears into the ground to kill mammoths, experts say

When it came to bringing down giant animals, prehistoric hunters faced a monumental task, literally. Now researchers have shed light on how they managed to do it.

Experts studying sharp stone points made by the Clovis people, who lived in the Americas about 13,000 years ago, say that instead of throwing spears at large animals like giant bison, mammoths or ground sloths, the tribes could have stuck their weapons pointing upward into the ground to stab attacking creatures.

“We are only now realizing that people in many cultures have been hunting or defending against large animals with cultivated spears for thousands of years,” said study co-author Dr. Scott Byram of the University of California, Berkeley.

He added that hunters using spears were encouraging large game to attack them, and that a planted spear could produce much greater force than a thrusting or thrown spear. “It follows that spears were preferred against large, aggressive animals,” he said.

Writing for Plus One Magazine The team notes that while Clovis points are well known, no intact weapons have been found, so the exact way these points were used is unclear.

However, they point out that historical sources—including paintings of wild boar hunting and descriptions of bear, lion, and jaguar hunts—depict people using ground-mounted piercing weapons when hunting large animals, while this approach was also used to defend against predators and against attacking war horses in military battles.

To explore the idea that the Clovis people might have used their stone heads in a similar way, the team conducted experiments using replicas of what they thought the weapons might have looked like, with the stone head attached to a ligament between a wooden post and a bone bar.

The team found that the Clovis spearhead could penetrate cowhide with relatively light force, but would break if dropped onto an oak plank with high force (representing an encounter with bone). However, the team found that they could modify the ligaments so that they would break in the latter scenario, freeing the spearhead without breaking it but potentially allowing the spear to sink deeper into the animal.

Byram added that the shape of some Clovis points may have contributed to the creation of highly effective spearheads, and that such an application may explain the discovery of complete Clovis points with unbutchered mammoth remains.

The team now plans to conduct experiments involving something like the mammoth version — a block of ballistic gel mounted on a moving object with a large mass — in order to understand how the outcome might change if the impact didn’t involve a force acting only in the direction of the head.

This is not the first time archaeologists have suggested a “spear use” for Clovis points, said Professor Metin Eren of the Department of Anthropology at Kent State University in the United States, who was not involved in the work.

But he added: “Of course, the main problem is that archaeologists have never discovered any kind of wooden spears or Clovis arrows, let alone any conclusive evidence that spears were actually used in a spear-like manner. We really need to make sure that our conclusions are not outweighed by our experiments and, more importantly, the actual archaeological record.”