- Depictions of ancient humans in both scientific and popular culture contexts picture them throwing spears at the thick hides of mammoths.
- A new study from archaeologists at UC Berkeley suggests that Pleistocene hunters likely used planted pikes, topped with sharp Clovis points, to kill megafauna like mammoths, mastodons, and even saber-toothed cats.
- This theory shows how this system would’ve acted like an ancient hollow-point bullet and delivered a more devastating blow compared to a thrown spear.
It’s been long suggests that the arrival of Homo sapiens in the Americas caused (or at very least contributed to) the disappearance of megafauna like mammoths through overhunting—but how exactly did a collection of small, fragile humans take down these four-to-six ton behemoths some 13,000 years ago?
The typical depiction of humans hunting mammoths toward the tail of the Pleistocene imagines them chucking spears, tipped with sharp rocks known as Clovis points, as the beasts rear up on their hind legs in fury, but a new study from archaeologists at UC Berkeley think that ancient humans likely worked smarter, not harder.
Instead of throwing spears, which likely would’ve had little impact force on the animal, this new study published in the journal PLOS One says that hunters likely planted their spears in the ground and waited for charging mastodons, bison, or even saber-toothed cats to impale themselves upon the fearsome spiked tips. This would have driven the spear much deeper into the animals, almost acting like a modern hollow-point bullet, according to the researchers.
“This ancient Native American design was an amazing innovation in hunting strategies,” UC Berkeley’s Scott Byram, first author of the study, said in a press statement. “This distinctive Indigenous technology is providing a window into hunting and survival techniques used for millennia throughout much of the world.”
This mystery initially began with the discovery of Clovis points, an array of various-sized sharp rocks made from material like flint or jasper that use fluted indentations at the base of the stone. This rock is one of the most common archaeological items found during this period, but experts weren’t exactly sure how they used them, as the Clovis point is usually the only part of the weapon system that survives the ravages of time.
After analyzing historical records of people hunting or fighting with planted pikes, the team also designed a test platform to see how much force a spear could withstand before snapping. Similar experiments that launched spiked weapons at ballistic gels showed that a spear, thrown at an animal like a mastodon, would’ve felt like little more than a pinprick, the researchers say. But the foreshaft collapse following the Clovis point's entry into an animal’s hide likely would’ve increased the damage.
“The kind of energy that you can generate with the human arm is nothing like the kind of energy generated by a charging animal,” UC Berkeley’s Jun Sunseri, a co-author of the study, said in a press statement. “It’s an order of magnitude different. These spears were engineered to do what they’re doing to protect the user.”
This new theory also supports another idea surrounding Clovis points, which is that they’re very time-consuming to make and also more resource-intensive than typical arrowheads. This means it’s unlikely that an ancient hunter could want to waste such a resource on an attack method with a low success rate.
“Sometimes in archaeology,” Byram said, “the pieces just start fitting together like they seem to now with Clovis technology, and this puts pike hunting front and center with extinct megafauna. It opens up a whole new way of looking at how people lived among these incredible animals during much of human history.”
Although the strategy behind ancient humans’ megafauna hunting efforts appears to be coalescing, Byram and his team want to conduct a more realistic test involving a replica mammoth to simulate what would happen if a charging animal ran directly into this theorized pike system. However, because archaeologists only find Clovis points and not the accompanying weapon system, it's difficult to know for sure if such a system was used.
If it works as expected, we’ll need to rewrite our understanding of how indigenous peoples survived and thrived in the Americas 13,000 years ago and beyond.
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
