The Clacton Spear, or Clacton Spear Point, is the tip of a wooden spear discovered in Clacton-on-Sea in 1911. At approximately 400,000 years old, it is the oldest known worked wooden implement.[Allington-Jones, L., (2015) Archaeological Journal, 172 (2) 273–296 The Clacton Spear – The Last One Hundred Years]
Description
The spear is made of
yew shaped into a point, and when found was long, diameter and straight, but drying out during the first decades of storage shrank it to , and warped it slightly into a curve. Treatment by wax impregnation in 1952 apparently stabilized it. At some time before this, the last of the tip had broken off and had been re-attached by conservators. This again came off in 2013 and was re-attached.
[ It is on display at the Natural History Museum, London where its age is stated as 420,000 years.
Tests to reproduce it suggested that it had been formed by scraping with a curved flint tool of the type found on the same site, known as the Clactonian.][McNabb, J., (1989) Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 55, 251-271 Sticks and Stones: A Possible Experimental Solution to the Question of how the Clacton Spear Point was Made]
Discovery and significance
The spear was discovered by Samuel Hazzledine Warren, an amateur pre-historian, who had been looking for simple stone tools in a known Palaeolithic sediment. He at first thought it was an antler, but presented it to the Geological Society of London as a spear tip.[ Proceedings of the Geological Society of London May 10, 1911, 67 xcix] This identification was generally accepted for some time. However, as it was not a whole spear and the great age meant that it was well before modern humans, many academics doubted that the amount of planning required to manufacture a spear and use it for hunting was within the cognitive capabilities of early hominids and argued it was a simpler tool such as a digging stick.[ However, the discovery of several more complete spears around 300,000 years old,][Schoch, W. H., Bigga, G., Böhner, U., Richter, P., & Terberger, T., (2015) Journal of Human Evolution 89 214–225 New insights on the wooden weapons from the Paleolithic site of Schöningen] the Schöningen Spears in 1995 in Germany, demonstrated this capability, and the Clacton Spear is today generally regarded as a spear point.[
]
Context of find
The environment of deposition for the spear has been interpreted as the border of a river valley, with the local vegetation being a mixture of primarily mixed oak forest and secondarily grassland.[Schreve, D. C. (1997). Mammalian biostratigraphy of the later middle pleistocene in Britain (PhD thesis). University of London, London, United Kingdom.]
The site is characteristic of the "Clactonian industry", which shows evidence of the production of lithic flake and Lithic core tools, but with little evidence for the production of Hand axe.
See also
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Boxgrove Palaeolithic site
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Swanscombe Palaeolithic site
