To kill mammoths in the Ice Age, people used planted pikes, not throwing spears | Hacker News Reader

To kill mammoths in the Ice Age, people used planted pikes, not throwing spears

phys.org

69 pointspseudolus54 comments

> Instead, researchers say humans may have braced the butt of their pointed spears against the ground and angled the weapon upward in a way that would impale a charging animal. The force would have driven the spear deeper into the predator's body, unleashing a more damaging blow than even the strongest prehistoric hunters would have been capable of on their own.

I used to think humans were badass for hunting mammoths with throwing spears. But this is just a whole next level. Apparently hunting mammoths involved:

1. Getting a mammoth to charge you full speed

2. Standing your ground

3. At the right moment planting your spear in the ground

4. Holding the spear at the right angle as tons of angry mammoth crashes into it

5. Moving out of the way so you don’t get crushed by the dying mammoth.

Completely badass!

It's weird that they call the mammoths "predator" when they were herbivores and we were hunting them.

I think the context for that section has shifted to "a charging animal" of unspecified diet, but I agree that "predator" is still a mismatch.

the technique is known as the Anthony Hopkins edge and its a surefire way to take out large ill-tempered beasts

You beat me to it :(

I don't know how true it is but when I was a kid, I remember seeing an illustration in a book that showed this technique to demonstrate how Maasai boys killed lions.

Kill the lion and you go home as a man; don't kill the lion and you're a meal.

Then: 9-year-old kills lion, becomes a man

Now: 9-year-old not allowed to walk to friend's house without an adult

Due to a lack of lions, 9-year-olds today should kill a car instead, I guess.

> Due to a lack of lions, 9-year-olds today should kill a car instead, I guess.

You mean children should, for example, throw a big brick from a bridge over a highway - and then run away?!

This is not the kind of thing that I believe 9-year-olds should learn. :-(

I forgot the sarcasm marker.

Regardless, cars certainly predate on more 9-year-olds than lions do in this day and age.

Well yeah, the training between the two 9 year olds is entirely different. One was taught to fend off lions the other was given an ipad and youtube.

The same is probably true for most kids the last 100 (or more) years. When I was 9 I was busy training to hit balls with a stick.

bo staff, or baseball bat?

Baseball bat. I didn't know people used a bo staff to hit balls.

Well...

Lol. That didn't even register at first. Whoosh.

That still makes you far more of a warrior than Jimmy Roblox.

Both paths teach that man is the dangerous one.

The Maasai still exist, dude, and killing a lion is still a normal rite of passage.

In our village the 8-10 year old boys would be responsible for herding the cows back home from the mountains at night as well as riding a horse to the town over to trade milk and cheese.

Children aren’t taunted into killing apex predators any more. What a fucking comment on society am I right.

This is similar to how wild boar was hunted in Europe - there were special spears made with extra crossbars to reduce the chance of a boar reaching the spear holder after being impaled.

Later, they learned to, after inciting the boar, run towards the center of town, then overcome it with arrows just as it arrived.

to those unaware: 11 is the laughing taunt in aoe2 and is used in the community like lol. the poster above was describing how you hunt a boar in aoe2 which is a vital source of food in early game. it is risky to use your towncenter to weaken a boar because if you kill it with the towncenter you can not harvest the food

Thanks, I think that's a style/level of in-joke that needed an explanation for the wider audience. Particularly since the first arrow-part sounds almost plausible. (And "11" on its own is unlikely to give many useful hits.)

wololo

(And this - of course is what AoE shaman/priest/religious units would chant to "convert" enemy units to their side ... :)

I don't know how much this is based on science but our history (and popular) books about ice age always depicted a hunting method that involves a dug out pit with spikes. Then the hunters would chase the animal and steer it towards the pit, where the mammoth gets trapped and they could finish him off.

Maked sense to me as a kid because directly attacking a thick wooled mammoth with stone tips on sticks wouldn't be feasible.

I guess the theory from the article could work too, it's more flexible than betting on chasing the animal to a specific pit.

But I am surprised the pit method isn't mentioned at all as an option in the article.

It's a question of a typical behavior of mammoth. One method would work if an encircled mammoth was apt to charge humans. The other method would work if a mammoth was prone to panic and always ran away from aggressors. Looking however at the size of the animal, I doubt if the latter was its survival strategy.

I think our ancestors may have made use of ropes and simple wooden frames to lift the spears and hold them at the right angle, from a safe distance.

I doubt you'd have enough control or the right vantage point to strike a killing blow from the end of a rope. You need to puncture vitals or you'll just end up with a very angry mammoth with a spear sticking out of it. So "steering" the spear to the point of impact and reacting precisely in the last fraction of a second is important. A modern corollary might be trying to shoot clays by steering your shotgun with a rope.

So long as you can survive the encounter, if you inflict any kind of decent wound, wouldn’t the animal eventually die due to blood loss or infection? Not at metal as an immediate kill, but whatever works.

Even hitting vitals won't be "immediate", you'll still have some hectic moments/minutes dodging the thrashing mammoth. But if you don't strike a mortal blow the danger is much greater because the animal won't weaken and slow down. Instead it'll get pissed and probably fight back even harder.

I think rope, at least of any appreciable length and strength, is a much more modern technology.

as shown in the movie 10,000 BC

I wonder how common it was to be mortally injured by a breaking spear? If the spear is too heavy it's slow to move and less likely to result in a quick kill, if it's too light it'll break off without penetrating deep enough for a kill. Engineering trade-offs our ancestors must have pondered.

"ground the spear and receive a charge" is spear knowledge 101 in HEMA communities. A butt-spike helps.

It works so well that you're generally not allowed to do it in the full contact rulesets, because it's counterproductive to break your opponents today; you can't fight them tomorrow!

What does HEMA community refer to?

Historical European martial arts

Can be used on bears too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5rhOfa8Woc

Not to argue with anything, but after observing it for a while, I cannot treat HEMA seriously. And this is true about most of the "reconstruction" stuff. The problem is, that guys who "do" it are almost exclusively not the guys who would participate in city-level wrestling or even powerlifting competition. To say it bluntly, most of them don't have the most basic fitness level.

The point of that entire activity is to learn by experience what is doable/not doable with some historic tools, and hence derive, how these tools were probably used. But their learnings aren't very valuable, since it's pretty evident they aren't anywhere near of strength and coordination of a trained person. I would bet a fucking (professional) figure skater would beat them with a stick.

And this is super important, because the supposed original users of a given tool are almost exclusively supposed to be people trained to wield it daily from the childhood. Not to mention they wouldn't spend much time in front of a monitor ever.

Lots of people say this. Then they come to fighter practice, and when they can walk again, they tend to rethink their position.

The overall fitness level of reenactors isn't great! Granted freely! but: skill does mean something.

Mostly, also -- the people doing the most historical research tend to be the fittest. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afqhBODc_8U, e.g. are a pretty athletic bunch.

There's an "Ancient Hunters Overlook" in the badlands National Park, where the natives would hunt Buffalo by, well, running them off the overlook. Definitely beats trying your luck with a thrown spear.

https://www.nps.gov/places/ancient-hunters.htm

Running prey into nets, or in this case, pikes seem to be make more sense. The steppe nomads of Asia used mass volleys of arrows from horseback to harass and direct pret into prepared positions. Ranged weapons (thrown rocks, hunting clubs, bows and arrows) can fill those roles.

I have my doubts that a spear launched by human muscle power would be effective against megafauna, although maybe with an atlatl?

I've seen a video of an African elephant being killed by a mob of people throwing spears at it. From one of those old exploitative Italian documentaries.

In the Yellowstone area they would also run them off cliffs.

See also desert kites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_kite), which you can still find on google maps, and were probably used for hunting.

Something like this? https://www.autoweb.cz/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/lovci-mamu...

I wish they had been a little less good at this, to be honest. All the charismatic megafauna were killed off.

That's true... but african elephant is fairly close in side to Wooly mammoth? (though with less majestic tusks)

Yes, but woolly mammoths were on the smaller side. Steppe and Columbian mammoths were bigger, as were (longer ago) Mammuthus meridionalis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth#Description

Evolutionarily though, Indian elephants are more closely related to mammoths than either are to African elephants.

Elephants are now pretty unique, but there were many more related species in the past. Most of the big animals in general were killed off, many with no big relatives remaining.

don't worry, our current society is destroying way more species than those old fossils ever did!

Braveheart style. Nice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDVuQi4gdtk

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