The earliest example of a sharpened wooden pole, or spear, comes from Schdningen in Germany. There, eight spears were dated to 400,000 B.C.E. The ancient hominid hunters who sharpened each pole used a flint shaver to cut away the tip to form a point and then singed the tip in the fire to harden the wood, making it a more effective weapon. A similar technique was used by hunters in Lehringen near Bremen in Germany, where a complete spear was found embedded inside a mammoth skeleton, suggesting such spears were used mainly for hunting rather than warfare or self-defense. The need for food was so great that a mammoth would be attacked with only a flimsy spear, although its use would have been more to scare the mammoth in the direction of a trap or pit dug previously than to attack it directly.
Around 60,000 B.C.E., Neanderthals living in rock shelters and temporary hunting camps in France sharpened small pieces of flint and slotted them into the tips of their spears. Hunters in the Sahara used sharpened stones in the same way, while Central Americans used obsidian, a natural volcanic glass. Around the world, Stone Age people gradually learned how to work small stones or flints into tiny, sharpened blades known as microliths for use as spear points. The greatest advance, however, came with the development of metalworking, notably copper, in southeast Europe after 5000 B.C.E., followed by bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, around 2300 B.C.E., and then iron a millennium later. These new technologies allowed hunters and warriors to make hard, sharp, effective spear points.
