What kind of wood are spears made of

The ready-to-go size will also save you a ton of carving work. Choose live wood or a recently deceased sapling for your spear. Carve a point on one end or both ends , making it as sharp as possible. Rotate the carved area just above the flames of a small fire to dry out the wood.

It should be golden brown, with little to no black char. You could peel the bark from the shaft, or leave it in place for grip. Two hanging whitetails in late November served as our test subjects, and an eager group of guys in my survival class served as the test panel. Spearheads can be purchased from numerous blade-smiths online. It may also be possible to purchase a spearhead from a local knife shop if your city has one.

Purchased spearheads may not come pre-sharpened. You could sharpen the blade yourself if you like, or take it to a professional knife sharpener. Find a suitable haft. Depending on the thickness of the haft, you may have to taper one end in order to properly secure the spearhead.

Make sure you only carve enough to fit the spearhead; carve too much and you will have a gap between the haft and the spearhead resulting in a loose fit. Check the fit of the spearhead. Put the spearhead on the haft making sure the fit is snug. You will be drilling a small hole here to secure the spearhead. Attach the spearhead. You can secure the spearhead with a short nail or a pin.

Alternatively, you may simply use glue or epoxy if you do not have access to a drill. If there are multiple holes in the spearhead socket, make sure you drill straight through the haft, otherwise the pin or nail will be out of alignment with the socket holes. Secure one end of the nail using either a pair of pliers or a vice.

This is to stabilize the spear while you hammer the other end of the nail. Repeat this process on the opposite side until both ends of the nail are securely fastened. Personally I would say about an inch or half an inch above your own height! That should be the perfect length for your spear.

Not Helpful 29 Helpful Use a sharp rock such as flint or obsidian. If you can't find that, get a large rock the size of a blade, and chisel to make a sharp point with barbs. Make a notch in the stick with the rock, and place it inside out with sap around the side optional , or you can use vine or rope to secure it. Not Helpful 26 Helpful Put some sand on a flat surface and rub the stick on there, or just rub the stick on a brick or stone wall.

Not Helpful 40 Helpful A nearby forest is a good place to start; however, if you don't live near any wooded areas, hardware stores will have wooden poles used for broom- and mop-handles which would work quite well. Not Helpful 25 Helpful Oak or spruce would work pretty well, both are very strong.

You would follow the same steps either way. Not Helpful 19 Helpful How do I make a wooden spear head that is separate from the body of the spear? You can use twine to attach it to the body, but make notches in your spear head and stick. Yes, spear fishing has been practiced around the world for centuries. Not Helpful 37 Helpful If the mop stick is plastic then use UHU multi purpose adhesive then follow the instructions for the last method.

Not Helpful 33 Helpful Not Helpful 34 Helpful Not Helpful 8 Helpful Include your email address to get a message when this question is answered. Decorate your spear. Once you have fire-hardened your spear-tip or attached your metal spearhead your spear is ready to go. However, you may want to carve some patterns down the haft of your spear.

Or, you may want to wrap some leather around the haft where you might grip the spear to protect your hands. Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0. To attach an arrowhead or sharp stone to a prepared limb or pole, simply use the same method of wrapping as you would for making a knife spear. Rather than making a shelf for the arrowhead, create a notch in the center of one end of the branch.

The notch should be in the center of the chosen end and just wide enough to ensure a snug fit. An easy way to sharpen your blade is to do it by using a rock that has been broken in half by another rock.

Submit a Tip All tip submissions are carefully reviewed before being published. However, with composite weapons likely already in use in Europe, Late Pleistocene Neanderthals continued to use wooden spears during MIS 5e Gaudzinski-Windheuser et al.

The use of these weapons by H. This paper provides the first review of known ethnographic uses of wooden spears for hunting and violence as a means of better understanding this weapon technology and its variable uses amongst recent populations. Groups described in the ethnohistoric record as having used wooden spears are not direct proxies for hominins that made and used such weapons. This review is not proposing that Pleistocene humans were behaviourally, cognitively, or physiologically the same as recent spear-using populations covered here.

However, previous references to ethnographic data in relation to Pleistocene spear use have been problematically selective; it will be argued that this selectivity has underestimated the skills and knowledge of both recent spear-using populations, and, by extension, poorly framed previous perspectives on spear-using hominins in the past.

The wide-ranging and global overview thus provides the first opportunity to evaluate Pleistocene spear technologies by hominin populations, inclusive of H. It provides a pool of data from which we can evaluate the technological capabilities and variable use of these weapons and it is not intended to be utilised to represent cognitive comparisons between Pleistocene hominins and recent groups who utilised these tools. The best-known examples of recent hunter-gatherers using wooden spears are the Aboriginal Tasmanians Tasmania, Australia , and the Tiwi who inhabit Melville and Bathurst Islands Northern Territory, Australia.

The Tiwi and Tasmanians used wooden spears in terrestrial and aquatic hunting, and in interpersonal and collective violence Goodale ; Robinson ; Roth ; Spencer Hiatt ; McGrew ; Oswalt During the 19 th and 20 th centuries, Aboriginal Tasmanians were often interpreted as intellectually inferior on the basis of a false equivalence: that simple technologies reflect inferior intellects.

Fritz Noetling, a German geologist and palaeontologist, Noetling 64 , emphasis added wrote:. A modern mind cannot understand how it was possible that such a suitable material as the siliceous rocks from which the implements were manufactured, was not also used for weapons. To us it seems unintelligible, why the Aborigines did not fix a suitable flake to a piece of wood, thus producing a weapon far superior to the primitive wooden spear.

Yet this was apparently an invention the Tasmanian Aborigine never made. His mind was just as unable to conceive the idea of providing the wooden spear with a stone head, as it was to chip the tero-na-watta on both faces…. And more recently Rhys Jones wrote:. Like a blow above the heart it took a long time to take effect, but slowly but surely there was a simplification … a squeezing of intellectuality.

These views together demonstrate both early and persistent racism, and abuse of the ethnographic record of wooden spears; these characterisations continue to reverberate in relation to both Australian archaeology and Aboriginal rights Ryan xix ; Taylor Unfortunately, much of the ethnohistorical data pertaining to the use of wooden spears consists of accounts that were recorded unsystematically. Perhaps more significantly some of those doing the recording, including George Augustus Robinson, had direct roles in the disenfranchisement, internment, displacement, and genocide of indigenous peoples e.

Flood ; Ryan Underestimations of population sizes and misrepresentations of cultures and technologies went hand in hand with an agenda to remove indigenous populations from land coveted by colonial settlers. As other researchers have already highlighted e. Several researchers are working to right these historical wrongs, addressing the scientific racism underpinning interpretations of human culture e.

Garofoli ; Haidle The ethnographic accounts of the use of wooden spears by recent populations demonstrate that wooden spears cannot be representative of cognitive abilities. The underlying complexity of this technology, including the earliest archaeological examples, becomes even clearer when considering design features such as point of balance, offsetting of the tip, selection and organisation of wood as a raw material, and the ethological knowledge likely required to effectively use these weapons Conard et al.

There are also archaeological examples known from sites attributed to H. The objects bear tool facets and evidence of polishing, have symmetrically pointed distal tips, and possibly bear traces of charring, especially at the distal points, interpreted as fire-hardening.

Another example of a wooden spear comes from Wyrie Swamp, a terminal Pleistocene peat bog site in Southern Australia Luebbers The wooden finds from Gwisho B include digging sticks, wooden arrowheads and a possible broken point of a wooden spear. The drawing of the broken point Fagan and van Noten Figure 11, n. However, the morphology is consistent with the distal points of wooden spears. However, if a spear shaft, it could have been for a composite spear, with a tip of stone or another material.

Pleistocene wooden spears have been hypothesized to have been utilised primarily as thrusting weapons and relatively ineffective if thrown by hand. These hypotheses, particularly in relation to distances and hunting strategies argued to relate to the use of spears, rest almost exclusively on a selection of ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources. Recent experiments using Pleistocene wooden spear replicas have evaluated:.

These experiments help test hypotheses about weapon performance, but an overview of ethnohistoric and ethnographic data on wooden spear use will add key data to debates including the suitability of this weapon for different hunting strategies, prey sizes and types, and use in various ecological settings. Although ethnohistoric and ethnographic uses of spears have played roles in theories about archaic hominin and H. However, this characterisation, based on selective data, fails to account for the full range and diversity of uses, impeding our understanding of the technological, social, behavioural, and cultural diversity of the deep human past French This paper seeks to rectify this by providing a systematic review of ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of functional wooden spears that were utilized in hunting and violence.

It provides an accompanying open access database using DOI versioning that facilitates future additions and corrections to the dataset Milks , whilst maintaining the integrity of the original dataset upon which this paper is based. The materials for the ethnographic literature review included text-based sources located through indexes and bibliographies in the existing literature, as well as electronic databases.

Bibliographies of the sources pulled from these searches were also consulted for further identification of sources. Electronic databases were searched for text-based, image and video content. Research focused on English-based texts, included results on any geographical location, and published in any period. Bibliographies of publications citing ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of the use of wooden spears e.

Churchill ; Davidson a ; Davidson b ; Ellis ; Oakley et al. However, the database includes a column for fishing, and use of spears for fishing was recorded when encountered in the literature included in the review.

Future versions of the database can thus also incorporate further data on use of wooden spears for fishing. The search resulted in 60 individual publications and museum database records totalling 76 entries with some sources containing data on multiple groups. Further ecological data, giving context to use of wooden spears, are referenced appropriately in text.

For example, publications on Aboriginal Tasmanian groups often treat these as a single category, even though it is well understood that Tasmania was inhabited by multiple groups with different languages and cultures Robinson Cultural names have tended to reflect those in the original publications, though where known by the author, names reflecting indigenous preferences were used instead.

In cases of recording of use of complex projectiles, composite weaponry, and other types of weapons, if these data were encountered they were recorded, but they were not explicitly searched for; therefore, an NA in these instances should not be considered to represent a lack of these data in a given publication. In the dataset provided with this publication, for clarity about the sources of different data, each publication consulted for a given group is displayed as a unique record, and therefore groups may have multiple entries.

Similarly, publications that mention different cultural groups have multiple entries if the data were presented as such. The significance of this is briefly discussed in Section 6. This paper does not cover the manufacturing techniques of wooden spears, and nor is it an analysis of the morphometrics of ethnographic wooden spears.

This paper deliberately avoids the use of descriptive statistics in the analysis of wooden spear use, though in some instances, patterns are highlighted.

This is because ethnohistoric records are frequently unclear, there may be further unidentified instances of wooden spear use, and there are differences in the quality and types of data recorded in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries in comparison with data recorded in later periods. The aim of this review is not to distil the use of wooden spears into a single description, but rather to elucidate the variety of functions, prey, and environments in which they were recorded to have been used.

A limitation of this study is that the search involved English language results only, and there are likely many additional studies in other languages with relevant information. In addition, there are sure to be English language omissions, and as with all ethnohistoric and ethnographic literature, there are potential problems regarding the accuracy of data recorded.

Future versions of the open dataset will reflect additions and corrections to any errors see Data Availability below. The use of hunting with wooden spears is recorded for all of these, but the use of wooden spears for violence was not found for groups in Africa or South America.

Locations include groups practicing a variety of subsistence strategies from mobile hunter-gatherers to subsistence farmers. As regional temperatures and precipitation can change over time, this should be understood as an estimate. This comparison reveals that climates in which the spears were recorded to have been used includes all of the main climates Table 1 including equatorial A , arid B , warm temperate C , boreal D and polar E , and also includes the full range of possible precipitations including desert W , steppe S , fully humid f , summer dry s , winter dry w and monsoonal m.

Temperatures ranged from hot h to polar tundra T. The least commonly represented climates for use of wooden spears were boreal and polar climates. Global distribution of ethnographic accounts of the use of wooden spears listed in the accompanying database. Climates where wooden spears were documented to have been used in hunting primarily in equatorial and temperate climates, with a few examples in arid and polar climates, altogether encompassing forested, steppic, and savannah ecologies.

Tasmanian Aboriginal populations also hunted in temperate rainforests, as well as in open woodland and grassland Hiatt ; Hiatt ; Lloyd ; Roth The Tiwi inhabit Bathurst and Melville Islands off the north coast of Australia, which have a variety of different ecologies including open eucalyptus forest and woodlands, grasslands, and swamps, whilst the marine species including dugong were likely hunted in shallow, coastal marine habitats, including sea-grass beds.

The Kaska inhabit subarctic boreal forests in northeastern British Columbia, southeastern Yukon and southwestern Northwest Territories Honigmann Prey documented in ethnohistoric and ethnographic sources as having been hunted with wooden spears include terrestrial and aquatic species Table 2. The Kaska, inhabiting north western Canada, reportedly hunted bear using wooden spears Honigmann , though it is unclear in the source consulted whether this was the American black bear Ursus americanus , the North American brown bear Ursus arctos , or both.

Prey hunted with wooden spears. Body mass data are based on averages for given species Boitani and Bartoli ; Damuth ; Garland ; Grubb et al. Following prey size classes defined by Bunn , prey hunted with wooden spears span the entire range of size classes Figure 2. Overall there are more species reportedly hunted with wooden spears that fall into smaller prey size classes Size Classes 1 and 2 , contradicting the characterisation of spears including tipped and untipped as being best suited to hunt larger prey Churchill Size Class 3 animals — kg include the tapir, which inhabits forests and rainforests in South America Alvarsson , and possibly the grizzly bear if hunted by the Kaska Honigmann Size Class 4 animals — kg include crocodiles hunted in the Kimberly region of Western Australia Hardman and possibly dugong hunted by the Tiwi Goodale There is a lack of clarity in sources consulted see accompanying dataset regarding which technologies the Bubi in Bioko used to target different prey, and so the prey they potentially exploited using spears Table 2 should be treated with caution.

Selection of sizes of prey hunted with wooden spears in ethnohistoric and ethnographic literature in comparison with an average male H. From left: African forest elephant Loxodonta cyclotis , kangaroo Macropus giganteus , white-tailed deer Odocoileus virginianus , beaver Castor canadensis. Image composed by the author using silhouettes from phylopic.

Prey represent an array of animals with different behaviours and social structures, including both herd and solitary animals. The prey represented have a variety of predator responses, including both fight and flight responses. Most cases of the use of wooden spears for violence are confined to North and Central America, and Oceania, while no examples were found from South America or Africa Table 3.

Only in Australia and the Admiralty Islands does the use of wooden spears for violence overlap with their recorded use for hunting. The Tiwi used their heavy hand-thrown wooden spears in collective violence against settlers, including plain and barbed wooden spear designs which were reportedly capable of penetrating through human torsos, vertebrae, arms, and legs Goodale ; Morris While the Tiwi are generally reported as using spears as hand-thrown weapons, one account of collective violence against a settler tentatively suggests they may have used them as thrusting spears as well Morris These accounts support the ability of wooden spears of relatively light masses to lethally wound humans.

Photograph of one of the remaining Aboriginal Tasmanian spears. Groups recorded to have used wooden spears for violence.

This review is only concerned with hand-delivered spears, with two possible delivery methods: thrusting using one or both hands and throwing by hand like a javelin Table 4.

Delivery methods were unfortunately rarely recorded in relation to wooden spears, but a few key patterns emerge. Spear thrusting is also recorded for smaller prey animals such as deer and wild pig Goodwin In one instance, in relation to the Chuuk Truk Islands, Micronesia it was mentioned that thrusting spears had both ends sharpened, with both ends utilised LeBar Delivery methods recorded for wooden spears.

Both thrusting and throwing were utilised for within-group and group-group violence. The most frequently recorded cases of the use of thrown wooden spears for violence are of the Tiwi and Aboriginal Tasmanian peoples. It is worth noting in this review that distance estimates both aimed and distance throws for Aboriginal Tasmanians, whose spears weigh between and grams Milks a range from 30 to metres Lloyd ; Robinson ; Roth Although the upper limit may be exaggerated, the throwing of relatively lightweight spears at considerable distances for hunting and violence is relayed in multiple sources.

The Tiwi also threw plain as well as barbed wooden spears. Nine Tiwi threw this spear to distances between The Tasmanian and Tiwi literature together demonstrate the capabilities of both lightweight and heavy wooden spears to be thrown for distance contra Churchill In many cases the same spears were reported to have been used in both delivery methods, making them multifunctional weapons Clastres ; Horne and Aiston ; Krieger ; Tregear There are also groups that used different designs for different delivery methods.

Regardless of delivery method, wooden spears were almost always used alongside other types of weapons including composite spears tipped with stone, bone, horn, metal, stone, glass, shark teeth or stingray spines e.

Buskirk ; Drucker ; Goodale ; Hayden ; Spier In only 10 publications were specific data on hunting strategies associated with wooden spears clearly described. The only strategy not found mentioned explicitly in the literature was encounter hunting. Although clear accounts of hunting strategies are rare, the evidence is that hand-delivered wooden spears were utilised with nearly all known strategies and associated technologies.

Going forward, the use of ethnographic analogy for Pleistocene hunting behaviours and technologies needs to be considered carefully, not only because of potential physiological and behavioural differences, but also because of the colonialist history of the use of ethnographic data in human evolutionary studies.

One solution, proposed by scholars working to decolonise human origins, is to desist from representing early humans as primitive. This final section aims to explore the data in this review to provide a fuller means of contextualising Pleistocene hunting, whilst recognising that certain aspects of behavioural and physiological differences and similarities between H. The Eurasian Pleistocene hominins who manufactured and utilised the early examples of wooden spears occupied a wide range of ecologies, climates, and terrains, including densely forested regions in full interglacials, coastal regions in both glacial and interglacial periods, and open steppe and tundra e.

Benito et al. Archaeological wooden spears and evidence of their use have been found in a diversity of environments including from warm, closed-canopy forested environments Gaudzinski-Windheuser et al. While on the one hand, non-analogue ecologies may limit our ability to make direct comparisons between the suitability of wooden spears during the Pleistocene in relation to those made and used by recent H. Examples of taxa exploited by hominins in the Eurasian Middle Pleistocene include equids Equus mosbachnesis, Equus ferus sp.

The wide range of prey types and sizes in this ethnographic review, including both terrestrial and marine resources, demonstrates that hand-delivered wooden spears are not limited to either small or large game procurement, and are capable of killing a variety of animals of different size classes and with differing behaviours and ecologies. Recent experimental research on Pleistocene wooden spear use highlights that in skilled hands, these replica weapons are functional as both thrusting and throwing spears Rieder ; Milks et al.

The debate about the origins of throwing in human evolution has been protracted, but Longman and colleagues highlight how the inclusion of reference studies of modern athletes have served to produce a new synthesis which supports throwing activities amongst Pleistocene hominins. They would also have been important tools for self-defence against dangerous animals in Pleistocene landscapes Serangeli et al.

The weapon can be characterised by versatility in design in terms of length, diameter, mass, morphology and balance point, adaptable to the environment, the hunter, and the hunted Milks a. A variety of hunting strategies are known to be practiced by human hunters, with a complex interaction between environment, climate, prey size and behaviours, weaponry and number of humans hunting.

Social hunting, also called communal or cooperative hunting, indicates a social structure that looks similar to those of recent hunter-gatherers.

Social hunting can be small-scale with two to five members of the hunting group, or large-scale, with five or more hunters Gentry Steele and Baker , though the degree of planning depth necessary for either is arguable given that many species without language practice social hunting. Humans hunt alone as well, and particularly for smaller and solitary prey hunting in singly or in small groups this can also be a highly effective strategy, though this is rarely discussed in the literature on archaic human hunting strategies.

Multiple predation, or the taking of two or more animals in a single hunting episode, includes mass kills from a single hunt and kills taken one after another within the context of a single hunting foray. Similar to the taking of large adult prey, multiple predation is a strategy that increases fitness for the group. This is contrasted with H. White and colleagues propose the use of ambush and disadvantage group hunting by Late Pleistocene Neanderthals, involving the use of landscape features.

While patterns of Middle and early Late Pleistocene prey exploitation do largely appear to follow this model, this review demonstrates that almost the full range of hunting strategies were employed with wooden spears, and thus hunting technologies available to these hominins were likely less limiting than previously proposed. Observed patterns in hunting strategies are not likely attributable, at least not entirely so, to limitations of hand-delivered spears.

While Neanderthals, like H. The ethnographic data in this review demonstrate the potential for significant throwing distances for both lightweight and heavier wooden spears in the Pleistocene, beyond that which has been shown experimentally thus far.

However, it is unclear from the above experiments whether differences relate to material property differences, weapon tip shape, cutting edges, or kinetic energy. The Middle Pleistocene hominins that manufactured and used the earliest examples of wooden spears in Europe had different physiologies, and likely different behaviours, to those of recent spear users reviewed in this ethnographic survey.

This paper demonstrates that Pleistocene Homo was armed with spears that, on the basis of ethnographic evidence, were less limiting than previously assumed. Therefore, we cannot adequately replicate a technology on the basis of a few years of experience trying to utilise replicated technologies; researchers must acknowledge the limitations of evaluating prehistoric technologies on the basis of our own hands-on experience. Although we should treat ethnographic data as limited in its ability to build reliable analogies it is also imperative to not discount ethnographic data on the basis that it is not corroborated by the experience of present-day archaeological and anthropological researchers living in WEIRD societies.

By approaching ethnohistoric and ethnographic accounts broadly, taking into account variability, we can limit the tendency to flatten the past. Overall, the ethnographic record demonstrates a richness and variability of culture that is invisible in the archaeological record. With ethnographic reviews, a broader picture of potential variability of material culture and behaviour expands, and when used sensitively these data help us to better understand technologies and their social contexts.

The ethnographic record can provide a relevant and powerful third perspective on the archaeological record of human evolution when used sensitively and when approached holistically. Alongside experimental programmes determining the properties of technologies, ethnographic enquiries continue to act as a check on our frameworks of interpretation and, increasingly, challenge the assumptions and biases we each bring to technologies used in the human deep past.

All data supporting this review are available as a. The csv file titled Ethnography Wooden Spears V. The dataset has been shared as part of a collection, enabling future additions and corrections to be shared in the collection as a new version, while maintaining the original dataset.

The dataset can be accessed at and cited as: Milks, A. Ethnography of Wooden Spears. I would like to acknowledge the feedback I received in the course of that research from my supervisors, Dr. Matt Pope and Prof.

Louise Martin, as well as from Dr. Anne Best, and my examiners Prof. Marie Soressi and Dr. Nick Ashton. I would like to thank members of the Aboriginal Advisory Council and Zoe Rimmer at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart for some useful discussions about Tasmanian spears, and for kindly providing access to the spears in I am especially grateful to Sheina Lew-Levy and Matt Pope for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and on the very helpful reviews provided by two colleagues that helped me better clarify and present the data, methods and arguments made in this paper.

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