The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #163442   Message #4144354
Posted By: Sandra in Sydney
13-Jun-22 - 06:03 PM
Thread Name: Armchair Archaeologist (via Google Earth)
Subject: RE: Armchair Archaeologist (via Google Earth)
very ancient wooden artifacts. The Clackton spear was mentioned in a news article - Wood 'shaped the whole of human history', says this expert, which is why we must protect trees so I went looking for info

Clacton Spear The Clacton Spear, or Clacton Spear Point, is the tip of a wooden spear discovered in Clacton-on-Sea in 1911. It is 400,000 years old and the oldest known worked wooden implement.(read on)

the article mentioned the Schöningen spears The Schöningen spears are a set of ten wooden weapons from the Palaeolithic Age that were excavated between 1994 and 1999 from the 'Spear Horizon' in the open-cast lignite mine in Schöningen, Helmstedt district, Germany. They were found together with animal bones and stone and bone tools.[1][2][3][4] The excavations took place under the management of Hartmut Thieme of the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage (NLD).
The age of the spears, originally assessed as being between 380,000 and 400,000 years old,[5][6][7][8] was estimated from their stratigraphic position, 'sandwiched between deposits of the Elsterian and Saalian glaciations, and situated within a well-studied sedimentary sequence.'[9] However, more recently, thermoluminescence dating of heated flints in a deposit beneath that which contained the spears date the spears to between 337,000 and 300,000 years old, placing them at the end of the interglacial Marine Isotope Stage 9.[10][11] The Schöningen spears thus postdate the earlier fragmented Clacton spear point, attributed to Marine Isotope Stage 11,[12][13] but remain the oldest complete wooden weapons (read on)