Humans have made spears for 400,000 years, and chimpanzees make them too
Wooden spears from Schöningen in Germany and Clacton in England show people hunting with sharpened shafts at least 400,000 years ago. Humans are not alone in this: western chimpanzees in Senegal strip branches, sharpen the tips with their teeth, and use them to hunt small primates hiding in tree hollows.
A spear is simply a shaft, usually wooden, with a pointed head that may be the fire-hardened wood itself or a tip of bone, flint, obsidian or metal. Designs split into thrusting weapons, including lances and pikes, and throwing weapons, generally called javelins. The English word descends through Old English spere from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning spear or pole. Alongside the club, knife and axe, it counts among humanity's earliest and most widespread tools.
From around 200,000 BC, Middle Paleolithic people began flaking stone blades and fixing them to shafts with resin or bindings of sinew, leather or plant fibre. By 15,000 BC hunters used spear-throwers of wood and bone, often carved with animals, to add force and distance. A 120,000-year-old Neanderthal spear from Lehringen in Germany was found with the skeleton of a straight-tusked elephant.
Warriors in Homer's Iliad fight mainly with spears, perhaps mixing an older thrusting style with the throwing style of Homer's own day. From the seventh century BC, Greek hoplites carried a doru of 210 to 270 centimetres in the tight phalanx, and Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great later fielded the sarissa, a two-handed pike about 550 centimetres long. Roman legionaries relied on the pilum, a heavy javelin built to pierce and foul enemy shields, from the late second century BC until the end of the second century AD.
In medieval Europe the spear stayed the main weapon of many soldiers because it needed little steel and less smithing skill than a sword. Early Saxon England alone yields thirty spearhead categories, most leaf-shaped, and the Scots and the Flemish were known for long spears. Throwing spears survived in Ireland until the late 1500s, and the idea lives on today in the bayonet.
Source: Spear
