> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!