The oldest spear ever found, 350,000 years old, with one of the hunted horse’s skulls. Photo: Prof Nicholas Conard We are naturally adapted to a nice warm climate. We have seen that two million years ago, some groups of human ancestors known as Homo erectus, they who walked upright, migrated out of their African homeland to colonise the Old World, from Spain to China.
Some encountered for the first time, the cold. So we meet two basic needs — clothing and fire. Over countless generations both in Africa and beyond, they evolved.
Their brains increased in size. They made more efficient stone tools and knew how to survive colder weather by sheltering and using fire. So they have been given a new name, after a site near Heidelberg in Germany, where a jawbone was discovered over a century ago.
Remarkably, some of their spruce-wood spears, up to 2.53m long have survived, together with the bones of their prey. The stone tools they used to butcher horses litter the ground to this day.
Replicas of the spears have a range of up to 20m, and they were used alongside short stabbing spears. Successfully killing wild horses seems to have been carefully planned by slowing them down in the waters of the lake. In a reversal to their distant ancestors, the humans got to their prey first, for the cuts on the bones made by sharp stone knives were overlain by the tooth marks of wolves and sabre-toothed cats.
The evidence from the 20 to 25 butchered horses, along with the skilfully fashioned sp.