You’ve probably seen them in museum glass cases. Or maybe in a dusty textbook back in high school. Those jagged, somewhat terrifying-looking points carved from bone or flint. We call it the thorny spear, though archaeologists usually get more technical, referring to them as barbed points or harpoons.
It changed everything.
Imagine trying to feed a tribe when your only tool is a sharpened stick. It’s hard. You hit a deer, it runs away, and you’re left with a broken branch and a growling stomach. The invention of the thorny spear—essentially a projectile with backward-facing "thorns" or barbs—meant that once the weapon went in, it stayed in. This wasn't just a minor upgrade; it was the prehistoric version of a software disruptor.
How the Thorny Spear Actually Worked
Basically, the physics are brutal but brilliant. A smooth spear tip relies on immediate lethal force. You have to hit a vital organ, or the animal just shakes it off. But the thorny spear works on the principle of drag and "staying power."
The barbs are angled. They slide in relatively easily because the points are swept back. But the second that animal moves? The barbs catch on muscle fiber and skin. If the hunter is using a detachable harpoon head—a common variation found in the Magdalenian culture about 17,000 years ago—the head stays in the prey while the shaft falls away. This creates a "drag" effect. If the animal is in the water, it can't dive. If it's on land, it bleeds out faster or gets snagged on brush.
It's a grim reality of survival.
Researchers like Dr. Ludovic Slimak, who has spent decades studying Neanderthal and early Sapiens toolkits, point out that these weren't just random hacks. They were precision-engineered. We see this in the "uniserial" (one side) and "biserial" (two sides) barbs found across Europe and Africa.
Materials Matter
Honestly, you can't just make these out of any old rock.
- Antler: This was the gold standard. Reindeer antler is incredibly tough but flexible. It won't snap like stone when it hits a rib bone.
- Bone: Often used for smaller fish spears.
- Flint: You can knap tiny "microliths"—razor-sharp stone flakes—and glue them into a wooden shaft using birch tar or pine resin. This creates a "composite" thorny spear that is basically a saw-toothed nightmare for anything it hits.
The Katanda Find: A Game Changer
For a long time, everyone thought Europeans were the only ones clever enough to make complex barbed tools. That was the "Eurocentric" view of history.
Then came the Katanda sites in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In the late 1980s and early 90s, anthropologists like Alison Brooks and John Yellen found sophisticated barbed bone points. The shocker? They were dated to around 75,000 to 90,000 years ago. That is way older than the European finds. It suggests that humans were using the thorny spear design to hunt massive catfish in the Semliki River long before we ever stepped foot in France or Spain.
It proves that the human brain was already "wired" for complex mechanical solutions much earlier than we thought. We weren't just poking things. We were designing systems.
Why We Stopped Using Them
You don't see many hunters carrying a thorny spear into the woods today. Why?
The bow and arrow happened.
Technically, an arrow can have barbs, but as we shifted toward high-velocity projectiles, the weight and air resistance of large "thorns" became a liability. A barbed spear is heavy. It's meant for close-to-medium range. Once humans started valuing distance and speed—think the transition from the Atlatl (spear thrower) to the longbow—the design flattened out.
Plus, we moved from "persistence hunting" (chasing an animal until it tires) to "instant kill" hunting. A barbed point is designed to stay in and cause damage over time. Modern hunters generally want a clean, quick kill, which is why modern broadheads are sharp as razors but usually lack the jagged "thorns" of our ancestors.
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The Psychological Shift
There is something deeply human about the thorny spear.
It represents the moment we stopped acting like predators and started acting like engineers. To make a barbed point, you have to visualize the future. You have to imagine the spear after it has entered the animal. You're planning for the struggle.
That kind of abstract thinking is what separates us from everything else on the planet.
Misconceptions to Clear Up
People often think these were just for "warfare." Honestly? Not really. While humans have unfortunately used every tool imaginable against each other, the thorny spear was primarily a caloric tool. It was about protein. Taking down a 1,000-pound beast or a 6-foot catfish was a team effort, and the spear head was the most valuable piece of tech the tribe owned.
Another myth: that they were "primitive." Try carving a symmetrical biserial barb out of a piece of weathered bone using nothing but a sharp rock. It’s nearly impossible for a modern person without years of practice. It's "high tech" for its era.
How to Appreciate This Today
If you want to see the thorny spear in its true context, skip the generic history books and look at the "Experimental Archaeology" community. People like Will Lord in the UK or various primitive skills experts in the US actually recreate these tools.
They use the same materials. They test them on carcasses.
What they find is that these tools are incredibly efficient. They don't just "work"—they excel in specific environments, like marshlands or thick forests, where losing your prey is easy.
Actionable Next Steps
If you’re fascinated by the evolution of human tools or the history of the thorny spear, don't just read about it.
- Visit a local natural history museum specifically looking for the "Upper Paleolithic" or "Middle Stone Age" sections. Look for the "microliths"—they are tiny, but they were the "thorns" of their day.
- Check out the Katanda Research. Read the original papers by Brooks and Yellen if you want the "raw" data on how these finds upended our understanding of human intelligence.
- Try a flint-knapping workshop. Many bushcraft schools offer them. You’ll gain an immediate, visceral respect for the sheer difficulty of creating a barbed edge.
- Explore the "Atlatl" associations. There are groups that still throw spears using traditional hooks. It’s a great way to see the physics of projectile motion in person.
The thorny spear isn't just a relic. It's the ancestor of the fishhook, the harpoon, and even the modern surgical staple. It’s the story of us learning how to hold on to what we need to survive.