Which came first, man or his tool?

Galvasean

http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/stone-tipped-spears-pre-date-existence-of-humans-131113.htm

85,000 years before the first known moderns.

Wibbs

An interesting discovery alright, though Ive a couple of problems with it. For a start how do they know they were spear points? Sure they look like something you'd stick a shaft to, but were they? They might be mini "handaxe" type tools. Or knives, a particular form of blade local to the area. I'd like to see examples with impact damage. One thing you'll notice if you ready up some stone spear heads is that while they are sharp, they're also very brittle and snap tips at the slightest provocation. Almost one use weapons. Also how many did they find? What was the proportion of these "spear points" to other lithics? Too often you notice even hard boiled researchers can concentrate on the "prettier" pieces and give them a meaning they may not have had.

You see this with Neandertal sites where handaxes and mousterian points all regular and cool looking can get priority. Goes triple for mousterian points. The current consensus is that the techinique for making them, the so called Levalliois method has a stated aim in reducing a chunk of flint into a specific shape like a point. Couple of probs with this. 1) most Levalliois end flakes aren't points. 2) It's incredibly wasteful a technique if all you're taking from it are points 2a) in the reduction of a flint core you get loads of useful razor sharp blades/scrapers along the way. 3) the discarded Levallois cores don't show regular points at all, or very rarely. Most often they're springing scraper/blade shapes as the last bite of the cherry. Yet read any description of the process and all that lot is ignored.

We certainly had throwing spears before then as the German finds of a few years ago showed. Perfectly preserved wooden(fire hardened tips) throwing spears at 300 odd 1000 years old, so hafting would seem a natural extension of that.

Adam Khor

I do wonder when and how did it occur to early humans/humanoids to stick a stone tip to a wooden spear... chimpanzees are known to hunt bushbabies with sharpened sticks but of course those are more like harpoons than spears, as they don´t throw them at all... what does it take for an ape to go from this, to throwing, and from throwing to the stone tips? Or did the tips come first?

Wibbs

Adam Khor wrote: »

Or did the tips come first?

There's a thought. You could see someone using a handaxe to butcher a carcass then making the leap of attaching a smaller version to a stick to kill it in the first place. Though pointy sticks probably came well before that. Like you say chimps use them. Problem being that wood preserves so very rarely. Without that site in Germany that preserved 5(IIRC) wooden spears we'd never know we were at that stuff half a million years ago.

Then again... *controversial* I'm still a little dubious of their dating. The dates were partially arrived at by looking at index fossils/species around them and the majority of same existed up until 30,000 years ago. Plus the stratigraphy is pretty muddled at the site. They could well be nigh on half a million years old or they could be 30,000...

Definitively dated Neandertal sites in Spain show them working with wood, tripods for cooking over fires and a spatula type yoke, so I've no doubt we're missing huge chunks of the picture.

The other issue I have with these new "spear points" is has anyone tried to actually haft the design to a shaft? Unless these guys had pitch or some other "glue" they're not going to be easy to haft, nor would they be very effective. Heat treated wood points would be better.

Adam Khor

Didn´t Neanderthals make glue? I think there's a post about it here

Wibbs

Apparently so, yea and it required a sophisticated process to get it(anerobic distillation IIRC). Again there may be an issue with dating, though in this case I'm much more confident as moderns never seemed to use the technique at all.