Neanderthals: Javelin athletes helped us show how effective they were at hunting with weapons

Good piece, interesting analogy and/or perspective...

Great share.

PO1 Tony Holland thanks for the interesting read/share.

We worked with a group of six club-level javelin athletes from the UK who threw replicas of a spear from the 300,000-year-old Neanderthal site of Schöningen in Germany at targets set at different distances. We recorded when they hit and missed the target, and filmed release and impacts with high-speed video cameras. This allowed us to evaluate accuracy and capture aspects of flight and impact that have never been scientifically analyzed.
Distance and impact

The results show that Neanderthals designed weapons that were capable of impacting a target with significant speed and energy from distances of up to 20 meters. This is surprising – archaeologists have typically viewed hand-thrown spears as close-distance weapons, limited to ten meters at most. This is an extremely close hunting distance and would severely limit the strategies that hunters could use. It would also make it extremely dangerous to hunt larger prey with aggressive behaviors, such as bison.

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