How Ice Age Hunters Used Planted Pikes to Impale Woolly Mammoths – WSJ

Ancient hunters are typically depicted as bands of spear-hurtling, weapon-thrusting men, taking down multiton woolly mammoths and mastodons with brute force.

But new research is disrupting the narrative of how Ice Age peoples of North America hunted between 12,000 and 13,000 years ago. A group of archaeologists suggests that those early humans planted sharp, stone-tipped pikes nearly twice their height into the ground at an angle to impale charging prey and fend off hungry predators like saber-toothed tigers.

A spear flung by even the strongest Homo sapiens would have felt like a pinprick to an elephantine mammoth. But impaling it with a braced pike would have resulted in a force 10 times more damaging, according to experiments using replicas and estimates of an animal s momentum.

There s nothing more compelling than the idea of using its weight against it as it comes at you, said Jun Sunseri, a University of California, Berkeley, archaeologist and co-author of a study examining the weapons, published in the journal PLOS One last month.

The weapon tip of choice 13,000 years ago in North America was something archaeologists call the Clovis point, a rock honed into a razor-sharp blade with scalloped edges. Named after the New Mexican town in which they were first found nearly 100 years ago, thousands of Clovis points the largest the size of a smartphone have been uncovered across the continent, some even inside mammoth remains.

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