page_title: Schöningen spears
section_title: Significance
hierarchical_section_title: Schöningen spears / Significance
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Knochen in Fundlage aus 13 II-4
context_page_description: The Schöningen spears are a set of eight wooden throwing spears from the Palaeolithic Age that were excavated between 1994 and 1998 in the open-cast lignite mine in Schöningen, Helmstedt district, Germany, together with an associated cache of approximately 16,000 animal bones. The excavations took place under the management of Hartmut Thieme of the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage.
  Originally assessed as being between 380,000 and 400,000 years old, they represent the oldest completely preserved hunting weapons of prehistoric Europe so far discovered.
  As such they predate the age of Neanderthal Man, and are associated with Homo heidelbergensis.
  The spears support the practice of hunting by archaic humans in Europe in the late Lower Paleolithic.
  The age of the spears was estimated from their stratigraphic position, "sandwiched between deposits of the Elsterian and Saalian glaciations, and situated within a well-studied sedimentary sequence." More recently, thermoluminescence dating of heated flints in a deposit beneath that which contained the spears suggested that the spears were between 337,000 and 300,000 years old.
context_section_description: The spears and the place of discovery have revolutionized the picture of the cultural and social development of early humans. Previously, the widespread opinion was that  Homo heidelbergensis (and Neanderthals, regarded as a descendant of H. heidelbergensis) were simple beings without language that lived on plants and carrion. The spears and their correlated finds are evidence of complex technological skills and are the first obvious proof for an active (big game) hunt. It seems that H. heidelbergensis could hunt herd animals that can run faster than a human, and this suggests that they had sophisticated hunting strategies, a complex social structure and developed forms of communication (language ability). H. heidelbergensis therefore already had intellectual and cognitive skills like anticipatory planning, thinking, and acting, that up until then had only been attributed to modern humans.
  Since 2010, the excavations on top of the excavation base continued in the framework of a project by the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage in Hannover and the Eberhard Karls University Tuebingen, Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology of the Institute of Pre- and Protohistory and Mediaeval Archaeology, supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Association). Numerous cooperation partners domestic and abroad are involved in the reprocessing and the evaluation of the excavations: Rijksuniversiteit Leiden (paleontology), Leuphana University Lueneburg (palynologie), Senckenberg Research Institute and Nature Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Leibniz University Hannover (geology), Institute for Quaternary Lumbers Langnau (wood anatomy), Romano-Germanic Central Museum Mainz and others.
  In 2009, Lower Saxony allocated public funds from the increased funds for the economy package II for the construction of a research and development centre. The centre, close to the place of discovery, is devoted to the inter-disciplinary research of the Schöningen places of discovery, as well as to the Pleistocene archaeology, and presents the original finds in an experience-orientated, modern exhibition.  The transparent research and laboratory area as well as an interactive visitor’s laboratory link the areas “research” and “museum”. A 24 hectare outdoor area presents typical plant communities of the interglacial, among them a pasture for wild horses. The place has been planned as an extracurricular place of learning. The building contractor was the town of Schöningen. Responsible for the conception and contextual planning was the Lower Saxony State Service of Cultural Heritage. The centre was opened at the beginning of 2013.
caption: Associated bone fossils
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