Historical and ethnographic sources document that portable pole-hafted weapons, or spears, were used for hunting and defense against large game in North and South America, Africa, Eurasia, and Southeast Asia for several millennia during the Late Holocene. Given the dominance of large game in North America during the Late Pleistocene, centuries when Clovis points emerged and spread across much of the continent between 13,050 and 12,650 years ago, pole-hafted weapons may have been used for hunting large herbivores or for defense against large carnivores.

“This ancient Native American design was a remarkable innovation in hunting strategy,” said Dr Scott Byrum, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

“This unique indigenous technology provides a window into hunting and survival techniques that have been used for thousands of years in many parts of the world.”

The team's discovery may help solve a mystery that has plagued archaeological communities for decades: how North American communities actually used Clovis stone tools, the most commonly unearthed remains from the Ice Age.

Clovis Points are named after the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where they were first discovered about a century ago. Clovis Points are formed from rocks such as chert, flint, and jasper.

They range in size from the size of a person's thumb to the size of a medium-sized iPhone, and have a clearly defined, sharp edge and grooved indentations on either side of their base.

Thousands of fossils have been discovered across the United States, some of which have been unearthed within preserved mammoth skeletons.

“Clovis points are often the only part recovered from a spear,” said Dr. June Sunseri of the University of California, Berkeley.

“The elaborately engineered bone hafts at the ends of the weapons are sometimes found, but the wood at the bases of the spears, and the rosin and string that made them work as a complete system, have been lost over time.”

“Furthermore, research silos limit such systems thinking about prehistoric weaponry, and if stone experts are not bone experts they may not get the full picture.”

“We need to think beyond simple artifacts. The key here is looking at this as an engineered system that requires multiple types of expertise in our field and in other fields.”

Building tools into powerful and effective systems would have been a priority for communities 13,000 years ago.

Tools had to be durable; there were only a limited number of suitable rocks that people could use to cross the land.

They might travel hundreds of miles without obtaining a long, straight stick suitable for making a spear.

“So obviously you don't want to risk throwing or breaking your gear when you're not sure if you're going to catch the animal,” Dr Byrum said.

“People who analyse metal military artefacts know about it because it was used to halt horses in war.”

“But before that, it wasn't really known for other situations, like wild boar hunting or bear hunting.”

“It's a common theme in literature, but for some reason it hasn't been talked about much in anthropology.”

To evaluate their spear hypothesis, the researchers built a test platform to measure the force that the spear system could withstand before the tip broke off or the shaft stretched.

A low-tech, static version of an animal attack using reinforced replica Clovis point spears allowed us to test how different spears reach their breaking point and how their extension systems respond.

This builds on previous experiments in which researchers fired stone-tipped spears into clay and ballistic gel, which may have been as painful as a needle prick to a nine-tonne mammoth.

“The energy that a human arm can generate is completely different from the energy that a charging animal can generate. It's an order of magnitude different,” Dr Jun said.

“These spears were designed to protect the wielder.”

“The sophisticated Clovis technology, developed uniquely in North America, is a testament to the ingenuity and skill used by indigenous peoples to coexist with ancient lands and now-extinct megafauna,” said Kent Lightfoot, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Team result Published in a journal PLoS One.

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RS Byram others2024. Clovis projectile points and foresharps subjected to reinforced weapon compression: modelling the encounter between Stone Age spears and Pleistocene megafauna. PLoS One 19 (8): e0307996; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0307996

This article is a version of a press release provided by the University of California, Berkeley.