Site of the Schöningen Spears
Site of the Schöningen Spears – Humans and hunting 300,000 years ago is part of the Tentative list of Germany in order to qualify for inclusion in the World Heritage List.
The Site of the Schöningen Spears has produced the best preserved and oldest hunting weapons in the world used by Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. The weapons consist of nine spears, two throwing sticks and a lance. The 300,000 years old site, which also holds botanic and faunal evidence of the era, was rediscovered in 1992 as a result of open cast mining. It has changed the perception of the abilities of early humans.
Map of Site of the Schöningen Spears
Load mapThe coordinates shown for all tentative sites were produced as a community effort. They are not official and may change on inscription.
Community Reviews
Zoë Sheng
Chinese-Canadian - 08-Aug-24 -
Schôningen means museum. You can visit the DDR border around here but for the spears you need to enter the museum. I arrived quite late so the lady gave me a discount to visit. It's a good museum and has lots of info on the flora and fauna for the last 300,000 years. It should take you 2h to visit thus I appreciate the discount as I only went to see the spears in detail.
You get to those in a while as you waltz past all the stuff you saw in other museums before, or at least you would have as a world heritage visitor. All displays are very detailed and in German and English - totally worth seeing. The spears are only one room next to flint stones and horse remains. There is also a video on how they are important and more details as you may guess.
Schöningen gave us an overview of how spears were important to humans, not just for hunting. It also explains why the spears when damaged or not hunt worthy were still used for other purposes. Other sites will just see skulls and maybe other bones but spears are a new discovery and definitely with such an amount.
If you don't have interest in even the small amount of prehistoric animals and human remains then the spears won't interest you much either. It's an easy drive otherwise, with a huge museum in the middle of nowhere, a small playground and cafe next to it and lots of hiking in the area.
Jan-Willem
A road trip from Holland to Berlin was already planned last weekend and that was a good opportunity to make a stop to view the Schöningen spears, as they just became a TWHS. We didn't go down into the open pit mine, but the spears are on excellent display in a very informative and enjoyable museum right on the edge of the quarry. The mine itself is not producing anymore and is only used for archaeology and other research, if I understood correctly. Because I'm not supposed to share photos of the exhibitions in public, the picture shows the pit mine as seen from inside the museum.
The exhibition provides much information about geology and life through time, about how the ice ages came and went and shaped the landscape, and includes remains of the animals that were hunted in the prehistoric days. It's called a 'research museum' and it also gives impressions of how the spears were found and researched. There is even a visitor's lab, to give you (and/or your kids) a taste of the work. Explanatory texts to the museum's permanent exhibition are both in German and in English. The building is already beautiful by itself.
I'm no expert, but I suppose that the importance of the find will give it enough value to be considered as world heritage. But besides that, they've done a great job in adding story and context in a refreshing manner to a number of long pieces of wood that were found in the earth's surface. I'm sure that influenced my rating.
The road signs point to 'paläon', there's free parking and a reasonable entrance price of 9 euros. There is also a bus stopping in front of the museum. Tours in the mine are only on Saturdays and Sundays. (And btw, the border memorial of Hötensleben, with remains of the Iron Curtain, is at walking distance.)
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Site Info
- Full Name
- Site of the Schöningen Spears – Humans and hunting 300,000 years ago
- Country
- Germany
- Added
- 2024
- Type
- Cultural
- Categories
- Archaeological site - Prehistoric
- Link
- By ID
Site History
2024 Added to Tentative List
Site Links
Visitors
7 Community Members have visited.