How do you think they got the mammoth to run into the trap of spears? Also, in case it turned towards you, you’d want a spear in your hands to make him turn.
i remember reading how eskimos would wrap sharp bone fragments in balls of fat and leave them for polar bears… then they would follow the bears until they died of internal bleeding.
Pikes were used much the same way right? Surprised I never put the two together, ancient humans weren’t stupid so of course they’d realize that was a better way of causing harm than just throwing it. Not to mention their use of leverage in weapons like the Atlatl. No clue on the timespan of these things but I do find this stuff interesting.
Honest answer, usually animal sinew, or certain grasses could be used as well. The nice thing with string, once it was figured out was you could make as much as you could, and make it as long as you wanted.
I totally count sinew as string. That probably led to plant string. Think about really fine string, or thread, and think about how many miles of it you carry around on you every day. It’s crazy how taken for granted it is!
Yeah, if your main form of offense/defense is that you are: large, and have massive fuck-off tusks on your front then charging seems to be a pretty good go to.
Many people have a silly idea in their heads that stone-age humans could not be as innovative and smart as we can because their technology was less advanced than ours.
They also look at an expertly-knapped spearhead like the ones in the thumbnail and think they could do that with a couple of rocks they find in their backyard.
These ancestors of ours were smart, they were creative thinkers, they made stone tools at an expert level that the average person today could not even hope to replicate. I love finding out new ways they were able to innovate.