Rahul Khadse
Exclusive from (1001 Inventions That Changed the World) Book
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RHN
Group Of Cyber World
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Administrator
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Rahul
Shampe
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Preface
by
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Trevor
Baylis
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General
editor
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Jack Challoner
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Patent processed at
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U.S.
Patent Office in Washington, DC
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Published
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By
Hachette India in 2013©
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Blog
No
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5
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Contain Type
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The
Ancient World
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Invention
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Spear
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Year
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c.400,000
B.C.E.
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Humans learn to kill with sharpened pols.
The earliest example of sharpened
wooden pole, or spear, comes from schoningen in Germany. There eight spears
were dated to 400,000 B.C.E. The ancient hominid
hunters who sharpened each pole use a flint shaver to cut away the tip to form
a point & 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 flimsy spears,
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 & temporary hunting camps in France sharpened small pieces of
flint & 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
cooper, in an alloy of copper & tin, around 2300 B.C.E, and then iron a
millennium later. The new technologies effective spear points.
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Word Meanings:-
- Hominid – A member of a family of primates which includes humans & their fossil ancestors.
- Flimsy – A weak & fragile, light & thin.
- Pit – The stone of a fruit.
- Obsidian – A dark glass like volcanic rock formed when lava solidified rapidly without crystallizing.
Posted in: The Ancient World
