To kill mammoths in the Ice Age, people used raised spears rather than throwing spears, researchers say

How did early humans use sharpened stones to kill megafauna 13,000 years ago? Did they throw spears tipped with carefully crafted, razor-sharp stones called Clovis points? Did they surround mammoths and mastodons and stab them? Or did they harvest wounded animals and use Clovis points as a versatile tool to obtain flesh and bone for food and supplies?

Archaeologists at UC Berkeley say the answer may be none of the above.

Instead, researchers say, people may have rested the end of their pointed spears on the ground and pointed the weapon upwards so that it would impale an attacking animal. The force would have driven the spear deeper into the predator's body and delivered a more powerful blow than even the strongest prehistoric hunters could have delivered alone.

A team of archaeologists from Berkeley has examined numerous written and artistic sources around the world for historical evidence that proves that people hunted with implanted spears.

They also conducted the first experimental study of stone weapons, focusing on pike hunting techniques, revealing how spears respond to the simulated force of an approaching animal. Once the sharpened stone pierced the flesh and activated its engineered retention system, the spearhead functioned like a modern hollow-point bullet and could inflict severe wounds on mastodons, bison and saber-toothed cats, they say.

“This ancient Indian design was an amazing innovation in hunting strategy,” said Scott Byram, a research associate at the Archaeological Research Facility in Berkeley and lead author of a paper on the subject published in the journal. Plus One.

“This unique indigenous technology provides insight into hunting and survival techniques that have been used throughout much of the world for thousands of years.”

The historical review and the experiment could help solve a mystery that has been the subject of debate in archaeological circles for decades: How did communities in North America actually use Clovis points, which are among the most frequently excavated objects from the Ice Age?

Named after the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where the sculpted stones were first found nearly a century ago, Clovis points were sculpted from rocks such as chert, flint or jasper.

The size of a thumb or a medium-sized iPhone, they have a razor-sharp edge and ridged indentations on either side of their base. Thousands of them have been found across the US – some have even been unearthed in preserved mammoth skeletons.

They have also been a plot device in pop culture. Characters in the video game Far Cry Primal use stone-tipped spears to ambush mastodons. In the film 10,000 BC, a similar spear is used to hunt mammoths. Scientists and hobbyists are reconstructing Clovis points – and some are even documenting the manufacturing process and use of these spears to hunt bison on YouTube.

These depictions make for a good story, but they probably don't take into account the reality of life during the Ice Age, say Byram and his co-author Jun Sunseri, an associate professor of anthropology at Berkeley.

Clovis points are often the only parts of a spear that have been found. The intricately designed bone shafts at the end of the weapon are sometimes found, but the wood at the base of the spear and the pine resin and lacing that help make them work as a complete system have been lost over time.

Additionally, research silos limit the way these types of systems think about prehistoric weapons, Jun said. And if stone specialists aren't experts in bones, they may not see the bigger picture.

“You have to look beyond the simple artifact,” he said. “One of the key aspects of this is that we see this as an engineered system that requires multiple types of specializations within our field and others.”

Building tools as strong, effective systems was probably a priority for communities 13,000 years ago. Tools needed to be resilient. People had a limited number of suitable stones to work with as they traveled across the land, and they might have to travel hundreds of miles without access to the right long, straight poles from which to make a spear.

So it's obvious that they didn't want to risk throwing or destroying their tools without knowing whether they would even pull the animal ashore, says Byram, who has combed through archival documents from the fields of anthropology, art and Greek history to trace the history of spears as weapons.

“People who analyze metal military artifacts know all about it because it was used to stop horses in war,” Byram said.

“But before that, and in other contexts involving wild boar or bear hunting, it wasn't very well known. It's a topic that comes up quite often in the literature. But for some reason it hasn't been talked about too much in anthropology.”

To test their pike hypothesis, the Berkeley team built a test platform that measured the force a spear system could withstand before the tip broke and/or the shaft expanded. Their simple, static version of an animal attack using a supported replica of a Clovis spear allowed them to test how different spears reached their breaking points and how the expansion system responded.

It was based on previous experiments in which researchers shot stone-tipped spears into clay and ballistic gel – which could feel like a pinprick to a nine-ton mammoth.

“The energy you can generate with the human arm is not comparable to the energy generated by an attacking animal. It is an order of magnitude different,” said Jun. “These spears are designed to protect the wielder.”

The experiment tested something Byram had been pondering for decades. While analyzing prehistoric stone tools in graduate school, he made replicas of Clovis points and spears using traditional techniques. He remembered how time-consuming it was to invest in a Clovis stone point—and how important it was for the point to work effectively.

“I started to realize that it actually had a different purpose than some of the other tools,” Byram said. “Unlike some of the notched arrowheads, it was a more massive weapon. And it was probably used for defense as well.”

Campfire conversations early in the pandemic between Jun, a zooarchaeologist who had learned from local communities during his time in Africa, and Kent Lightfoot, an anthropology professor emeritus at Berkeley, prompted them to dig deeper into the mystery. Through conversations with his VhaVenda mentors, Jun learned that the engineering that went into making the spear ends was just as important as the work on the tips.

“The sophisticated Clovis technology that developed independently in North America is a testament to the ingenuity and skill early indigenous people demonstrated in cohabiting the primeval landscape with now-extinct megafauna,” said Lightfoot, a co-author of the study.

In the coming months, the team plans to further test their theory by building a replica of a mammoth. Using a kind of slide or pendulum, they hope to simulate what an attack might have looked like when a planted Clovis pike encountered a huge, fast-moving mammal.

“Sometimes in archaeology the pieces just fit together, as seems to be the case with Clovis technology today, and that puts pike hunting at the center of extinct megafauna,” Byram said.

“It offers a whole new perspective on how people lived among these incredible animals throughout much of human history.”