Finding of Wooden Spears Evidence of Advanced Culture in Early Humans
From Times staff and wire reports
German scientists reported Wednesday that they had found perfectly preserved 400,000-year-old wooden spears, strong evidence that early humans were more sophisticated hunters than anyone thought.
The spears, the oldest wooden hunting weapons ever found, add to data indicating that our now-extinct ancestors were not primitive cavemen but rather had an advanced culture.
Reporting in the Feb. 27 journal Nature, Hartmut Thieme of the Institut fuer Denkmalpflege in Hannover said his discovery would force scientists to revise their opinions about early humans. He said the spears would have been used by Homo erectus, a human ancestor that lived between 1.6 million and 400,000 years ago.
