To kill mammoths during the Ice Age, humans used pikes, not spears, researchers say

How did early humans use sharpened stones to slaughter megafauna 13,000 years ago? Did they throw spears tipped with carefully crafted, razor-sharp stones called Clovis points? Did they surround and spear mammoths and mastodons? Or did they scavenge wounded animals, using Clovis points as a versatile tool to harvest meat and bone for food and supplies?

Archaeologists at the University of California, Berkeley, say the answer may be none of these.

Instead, the researchers say, humans would have pressed the butt of their pointed spear against the ground and tilted the weapon upwards to impale a charging animal. The force would have driven the spear deeper into the predator’s body, delivering a more devastating blow than even the strongest prehistoric hunters would have been capable of on their own.

Drawing on multiple sources of writings and artwork, a team of Berkeley archaeologists examined historical evidence from around the world of people hunting with embedded spears.

They also conducted the first experimental study of stone weapons focused on pike hunting techniques, revealing how spears react to the simulated force of an approaching animal. Once the sharpened stone pierced the flesh and activated its mounting system, the spear tip functioned like a modern hollow-point bullet and could inflict serious wounds on mastodons, bison, and saber-toothed tigers.

“This ancient Native American design was an amazing innovation in hunting strategies,” said Scott Byram, a research associate at the Berkeley Archaeological Research Center and first author of a paper on the subject published in the journal PLOS ONE.

“This distinctive indigenous technology offers insight into hunting and survival techniques used for millennia across much of the world.”

Historical scrutiny and experience could help solve a riddle that has fueled decades of debate in archaeological circles: How did North American communities actually use Clovis points, among the most commonly discovered artifacts from the Ice Age?

Named after the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where the shaped stones were first recovered nearly a century ago, Clovis points were fashioned from rocks, such as chert, flint, or jasper.

They range in size from a thumb to a medium-sized iPhone, and feature a sharp edge and fluted grooves on either side of their base. Thousands of them have been found in the United States, with some even being unearthed from preserved mammoth skeletons.

They have also been a key plot point in popular culture. Characters in the video game “Far Cry Primal” use stone-tipped spears to ambush mastodons. The film 10,000 BC uses a similar spear to hunt mammoths. Scholars and enthusiasts reconstruct Clovis points, and some even document on YouTube the process of their construction and use to hunt bison.

These depictions make for good history. But they probably don’t account for the realities of life during the Ice Age, said Byram and his co-author, Jun Sunseri, an associate professor of anthropology at Berkeley.

Clovis points are often the only part of a spear that is found. Sometimes the intricately shaped bone shafts at the end of the weapon are found, but the wood at the base of the spear and the pine resin and lacing that help them function as a complete system have been lost over time.

Additionally, research silos limit how this type of system can be thought about prehistoric weapons, Jun said. And if stone specialists aren’t bone experts, they may not see the whole picture.

“You have to look beyond just the artifact,” he said. “One of the key things here is that we look at this as a designed system that requires multiple subspecialties in our field and other fields.”

13,000 years ago, communities probably prioritized building strong, effective tools. Tools had to be durable. People had a limited supply of suitable rocks to work with while they were on the move. They could travel hundreds of miles without having access to the right kind of long, straight pole from which to make a spear.

So it makes sense that they wouldn’t want to risk throwing away or destroying their tools without knowing if they’d be able to catch the animal, said Byram, who has mined archival materials ranging from anthropology to art to Greek history to trace the history of spears as weapons.

“People who analyze metal military artifacts know a lot about this because they were used to stop horses during war,” Byram said.

“But before that, and in other contexts of wild boar or bear hunting, it was not very well known. It is a theme that comes up quite often in the literature. But for one reason or another, it has not been talked about much in anthropology.”

To test their spear hypothesis, the Berkeley team built a test rig that measured how much force a spear system could withstand before the tip broke and/or the shaft expanded. Their low-tech, static version of an animal attack using a reinforced Clovis-tipped spear replica allowed them to test how different spears reached their breaking point and how the expansion system responded.

This theory was based on previous experiments in which researchers fired stone-tipped spears into clay and ballistic gel, which would have felt like a pinprick to a 9-ton mammoth.

“The kind of energy you can generate with a human arm is nothing like what you can generate from a charging animal. It’s an order of magnitude different,” Jun said. “These spears were designed to protect the user.”

The experiment tested a concept Byram had been thinking about for decades. As a graduate student analyzing prehistoric stone tools, he made replicas of Clovis points and fashioned spears using traditional techniques. He remembers thinking about how time-consuming it was to invest in a stone Clovis point and how important it was for the point to work effectively.

“I began to understand that it actually had a different purpose than some of the other tools,” Byram said. “Unlike some of the notched arrowheads, this was a more solid weapon. And it was probably used for defensive purposes as well.”

Early in the pandemic, campfire conversations between Jun, a zoo archaeologist who learned from local communities during his time in Africa, and Kent Lightfoot, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Berkeley, inspired them to dig deeper into the mystery. In discussions with his VhaVenda mentors, Jun learned that the engineering that went into the butts of some spears was just as essential as the work that went into the points.

“The sophisticated Clovis technology that developed independently in North America is a testament to the ingenuity and skill that early Indigenous peoples demonstrated in co-existing on the ancient landscape with now-extinct megafauna,” said Lightfoot, a co-author of the study.

In the coming months, the team plans to further test their theory by building something that looks like a replica of a mammoth. Using a kind of slide or pendulum, they hope to simulate what an attack would have looked like when a Clovis-tipped spike collided with the massive, fast-moving mammal.

“Sometimes in archaeology the pieces start to come together like they seem to be doing now with Clovis technology, and that brings pike hunting to the forefront with extinct megafauna,” Byram said.

“This opens up a whole new way of looking at how people lived among these incredible animals for much of human history.”