The San and the Hobbits - The Darwinian Tourist - page 295

Then, in 1997, Hartmut Thieme of the Institute for the Preservation of
Historical Objects in Hanover reported an astonishing discovery in a gigan-
tic open-pit peat mine in central Germany. Peat, which is euphemistically
known as brown coal, is actually plant material that is in the process of
becoming coal. It is dug in vast amounts at many places around the world,
leaving behind immense open pits that pock the landscape like some skin
disease that will take centuries to heal.
Thieme and his group had carefully monitored this particular pit mine,
where gigantic rotary shovels dig out the peat around the clock. They and
others had already found bits of wooden artifacts dating to half a million
years ago, but the nature of the artifacts was unclear and their context was
lacking. Then the shovels uncovered an artifact-rich area that had obviously
been lived in by hunters.
Amidst thousands of bones of ancient horses, many of which showed
signs of butchering, Thieme and his co-workers found three 2-meter-long
throwing spears that could be dated to 400,000 years ago . 8 The spears were
preserved because the slow decay of the peat had kept oxygen away, and had
prevented the wood from being broken down.
Made from young spruce trees, the spears were highly sophisticated in
their design. Like modern javelins their centers of balance were about a third
of the way back from their points. And the points themselves were carved
from the bases of the trees. As modern Stone Age hunters know, the base of
a sapling has the hardest wood and makes the most ef ective point.
The San of the Kalahari and many other present-day hunter-gatherer
groups make similar spears. The San spears are only a little over a meter
long, because they are small people, but they can use them to bring down
large animals like gemsbok.
Thieme's accidental discovery makes one wonder how many other
essential glimpses of ancient Europe have been lost from peat mines. What
treasures have been crunched up by the rotary shovels as they gobble up the
landscape to feed some of the world's most polluting power plants with a
fuel that has one fi fth of the energy per ton as hard coal?
Luckily, the spears that Thieme and his crew did manage to rescue pro-
vide clear evidence that almost half a million years ago the pre-Neanderthals