LONDON - German scientists reported yesterday they had found perfectly preserved 400,000 year old wooden spears, strong evidence that early humans were more sophisticated hunters than previously thought.
The spears, the oldest wooden hunting weapons ever found, add to a growing body of data indicating that our now extinct ancestors were not primitive, grunting cave men but rather had an advanced culture. Dr Hartmut Thieme of the Institut fur Denkmalpflege in Hanover scooped out the spears and other tools at an open cast brown coal mine at Schoeningen, 100 km east of Hanover.