http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/11/15/human-ancestors-made-deadly-stone-tipped-spears-500000-years-ago/

Human Ancestors Made Deadly Stone-Tipped Spears 500,000 Years Ago

Human ancestors were fashioning sophisticated hunting weapons half a million years ago. An analysis of stone points from a site in South Africa called Kathu Pan 1 indicates that they were attached to shafts of wood and used as spears. The finding pushes the earliest appearance of hafted multicomponent tools back by some 200,000 years.

Previous discoveries had hinted at the potential antiquity of this technology. Based on evidence that both early modern humans and our closest relatives, the Neandertals, made stone-tipped spears, some researchers hypothesized that their common ancestor—a species called Homo heidelbergensis–shared this know-how. At half a million years old, the newfound stone points are old enough to be the handiwork of this common ancestor.
Kathu Pan 1 stone point

Stone point from the site of Kathu Pan 1 in South Africa reveals that human ancestors were making hafted weapons 500,000 years ago.

No wooden shafts were preserved at Kathu Pan 1, but marks on the bases of the stone points and fractures on their tips were consistent with hafting and impact, respectively.
These new findings follow on the heels of last week’s revelation that bow-and-arrow technology is older than previously thought and add to a growing body of evidence that, on the whole, our long-ago predecessors were more innovative than they are often given credit for. Stay tuned—more on this theme to come.

neomyrtus_ said:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/11/15/human-ancestors-made-deadly-stone-tipped-spears-500000-years-ago/

Human Ancestors Made Deadly Stone-Tipped Spears 500,000 Years Ago

Human ancestors were fashioning sophisticated hunting weapons half a million years ago. An analysis of stone points from a site in South Africa called Kathu Pan 1 indicates that they were attached to shafts of wood and used as spears. The finding pushes the earliest appearance of hafted multicomponent tools back by some 200,000 years.

Previous discoveries had hinted at the potential antiquity of this technology. Based on evidence that both early modern humans and our closest relatives, the Neandertals, made stone-tipped spears, some researchers hypothesized that their common ancestor—a species called Homo heidelbergensis–shared this know-how. At half a million years old, the newfound stone points are old enough to be the handiwork of this common ancestor.
Kathu Pan 1 stone point

Stone point from the site of Kathu Pan 1 in South Africa reveals that human ancestors were making hafted weapons 500,000 years ago.

No wooden shafts were preserved at Kathu Pan 1, but marks on the bases of the stone points and fractures on their tips were consistent with hafting and impact, respectively.
These new findings follow on the heels of last week’s revelation that bow-and-arrow technology is older than previously thought and add to a growing body of evidence that, on the whole, our long-ago predecessors were more innovative than they are often given credit for. Stay tuned—more on this theme to come.

watching…

It’s always quite surprising, to modern sensibilities, how quite sophisticated toolkits remained stable for vast tracts of time, with very little innovation, despite the inventiveness and imagination involved in the initial design of such tools. Suggests that creative individuals were extremely rare, but that their more practical achievements were very widely appreciated.

Bubble Car said:

It’s always quite surprising, to modern sensibilities, how quite sophisticated toolkits remained stable for vast tracts of time, with very little innovation, despite the inventiveness and imagination involved in the initial design of such tools. Suggests that creative individuals were extremely rare, but that their more practical achievements were very widely appreciated.

Or, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…

halfted?

Could be that they settled on the optimum design for a particular type of rock and a particular task – any change would have been a step backwards.

Peak Warming Man said:

halfted?

Hafted. Means mounted on a handle of some kind.

So when did man start cooking stuff, we are the only animal that deliberatly cooks our food.

party_pants said:

Could be that they settled on the optimum design for a particular type of rock and a particular task – any change would have been a step backwards.

Not usually the case at all. Earlier stone toolkits were eventually superseded by much more effective stone toolkits. But it took a very long time.

>>Hafted. Means mounted on a handle of some kind.

Well there you go, I thought it was just a typo and they meant shafted.

I’m having a cup of tea and a piece of Big Sister Rich Fruit Cake.

Peak Warming Man said:

So when did man start cooking stuff, we are the only animal that deliberatly cooks our food.

A general answer would be up to half a million years ago, for reasonably undisputed evidence. But control of fire and its use in cooking could go back much further than that. The reduction in size of teeth, and of parts of the body needed for digestion, suggest that hominids were eating an increasingly processed diet from the earliest Homo species onwards.

Bubble Car said:

It’s always quite surprising, to modern sensibilities, how quite sophisticated toolkits remained stable for vast tracts of time, with very little innovation, despite the inventiveness and imagination involved in the initial design of such tools. Suggests that creative individuals were extremely rare, but that their more practical achievements were very widely appreciated.

or that there were serious external constraints on innovation, rather than an intrinsic constraint on individual creativity.

Peak Warming Man said:

I’m having a cup of tea and a piece of Big Sister Rich Fruit Cake.

Awesome. This has taken half a million years to reach this point. May you savour the moment with some pensive, silent reflection as you dunk your cake in your tea.

and shagging close relatives (as far as the Homo lineage goes) (may/did) lead to some horizontal transfer of technology.

punctuated. stochastic. non-linear. horizontal transfer. shafted.

these are words I like to think when I go and make a cup of roooiiiiiiibos tea.

Men started cooking food when they pulled a carcass from the ashes of a wildfire.
They started using fire after observing it and trying to replicate it. No doubt they dreamed of frigidaires for a very long time until someone managed to put ice in a box.

It isn’t for us to speculate how long men dreamed of getting metal out of the rocks and shaping it into blades, we can roughly date when they did all these things.
Hafted stone spears are simple logic if you have been throwing sticks at things. It simply makes sense that the stick will be more accurate and deadly with a bit of stone wrapped to the end. It is by no mean feat however that a stone stuck to the end of a stick stayed there long enough to do the job. Such that it could well have been invented and forgotten several times before the glue set in stone. There is also factors of need or limitation. You need open spaces to want to throw sticks at animals. Not much good in dense rainforest.
The studies of toolmaking have shown before that stone tools were used by some but not all and in some cases gaps appear in the records which may indicate that some catastrophe did cause the lack of a clever tool maker or a lack of archiving and passing down of skills.

One cause for the above is extinction. Homo heidelburgensis did do that, become extinct somewhere around three or four hundred thousand years ago.

The above comments about how it took so long to progress such inventiveness have missed the mark in that though the mother of invention is necessity, being nomadic and being forced by climate change or restless neighbours would mean that collective thinking and shared tool use were not the order of the day.

The leaps and bounds in the evolution of our inventiveness only came about after we settled in the one place for long enough.