Did prehistoric swords exist BEFORE THE BRONZE AGE?

Most people know that in the Bronze Age we have various types of sword which developed even what we would refer to as a Bronze Age rapier, but this is a Bronze Age leaf-bladed sword of a type that I recently was talking about with my friend Scallagrim in a collaborative video that we did together and the question came up why did these come around and where did they come from and I got to thinking is it possible that swords existed before metal? Is it even possible that people had forms of sword in the Stone Age which we now have no record of? Hi folks, Matt Heaton here, scholar gladiatorian. Now this is a very conjectural video okay so this is a video which is going to be based fundamentally on evidence from anthropology rather than archaeology. What do I mean by that? So fundamentally we only really have evidence for swords, the earliest swords we have, being from the Bronze Age. In fact we do actually have stone-bladed swords or the remnants of stone-bladed swords which were very clearly made by people emulating bronze swords. We don't know exactly why they were doing this. Were they doing this because they couldn't afford bronze swords, they didn't have access to bronze swords and therefore they were trying to make a weapon which looked like a sword, in other words a high status object, but with the materials they had available? Or was it more that they were making an object out of other materials for some ritual purpose? So we do have purely stone-bladed swords the sword for example the flint scimitars, but those are very clearly modelled on Bronze Age swords and knives of their time, so they're stone replicas if you like of Bronze Age swords. But we do also have these Korean slate swords but again modelled on Bronze Age swords so that doesn't by itself answer the question of whether stone swords predate the Bronze Age. Now before I delve into the greater questions of did swords exist before metal swords, I have to answer, I have to kind of point out that so my background is in archaeology. I only did an undergrad, I didn't do postgrad so I'm an undergraduate archaeology and history graduate, but as part of that we studied anthropology. Now when we come to answer this question I think one of the big things that gets overlooked is we simply look at the archaeological evidence but we don't necessarily look at the anthropological, in other words later historical period studies of tribal peoples and their technology and then apply it to the prehistoric world and ask if they had used those things in the Neolithic for example, would there be any archaeology remaining? So I think this is a really really interesting topic to consider. This is completely conjectural, we do not really as far as I know have any solid evidence for Stone Age if you want to call it that so Mesolithic, Neolithic, Paleolithic, we don't have any evidence for Stone Age swords but absence of evidence in this particular case is categorically not evidence of absence as I'm going to illustrate. So I guess the first question to ask is can swords be made of materials other than metal in the prehistoric world or in places where they haven't yet started mining or obtaining metal, trading metal? Can it be made, can a sword be made of other materials? The answer is obviously yes, we're going to look at some examples. And would those materials have left any parts of a recognizable sword archaeologically? And often the answer is no. Right so let's have a little look at the types of swords that have been made of non-metallic material. So the first one we'll go to given that we're talking about the Stone Age okay so Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, primarily from a European but this could apply to anywhere Africa, Asia, America, wherever. Just so happens I have a Stone Age American artifact to show you. So this is from the so-called Spiro, well it's the the Spiro mounds in Oklahoma. Now this and a number of other artifacts have been donated to the channel by a wonderful gentleman by the name of Robert East. So many many thank you, many many thanks to Robert for sending these things over the course of some time. And this is a whopping great blade that Robert has sent. Now the Spiro mounds, if you look at American archaeology, we actually find a very diverse range of stone manufacturing styles throughout America over periods of time. So different regions actually have regional styles of working stone and equally it's different over time. Now this is the same in prehistoric Europe of course. We can date loosely, we can date for example arrowheads being certain parts of the Mesolithic or Neolithic based on their style and style of manufacturing. Moreover there are even ways of identifying the difference between for example Neanderthal stone artifacts and later human, us, artifacts although I am and many of you watching this will be part Neanderthal. Anyway, so there is a lot of, just because something's made of stone it can be made in various different styles just as the same with metal or any other material. So this particular artifact which was excavated in the 1930s in the Spiro mounds in Oklahoma as you will see is pretty freaking big but we don't know what it is. The shape of the base of the blade here, I mean I think we can pretty much with a 99% degree of certainty say that the point is the point, the stabby bit, but the back end we don't know what it was attached to and of course we don't have the organic materials that it would have been attached to. So this could have been mounted with a short handle and some kind of probably wrappings around the base so it would have ended up being a large knife or we could say short sword. I mean this is almost as big as certain types of ancient or classical world short swords. So indeed this could be defined as a stone sword. Okay so when we find blades of, and this is particularly big, you do find bigger ones but this is particularly large in the world of stone weapons, we could say that fundamentally yes absolutely we have stone swords and not just stone but also made of various other things as well. I mean the Maori patu we could say is almost a sword and that equally is also very often made of stone and sometimes wood but we'll get to wood in a minute. And I think often when people see these sort of leaf shaped blades then they think of a spearhead but it doesn't have to be a spearhead does it because the only thing which defines this as a spearhead is if it's attached to a long spear shaft. If you attach this to a short handle that long or a handle that long very quickly we would define that as a different type of weapon you would either call it a dagger or a sword. So absolutely a monolithic one piece stone blade like this could be mounted on a short handle and would absolutely be a sword not a spear. And just to reiterate a point that came up in my video with Scal, one of the points that I made about leaf blades where did they come from because it seems like the earlier bronze swords don't necessarily look like leaf blades they're so-called rapiers with thin tapered blades but the idea for these could have come from bronze age spearheads because you all know the shape of a spearhead everybody knows that they're all around the world throughout history even as we saw with stone you can have leaf shaped spearheads. Now if someone at some point has a large leaf shaped spearhead could be stone could be metal and they decide to either accidentally break the shaft off or it gets cut off short they suddenly find they've got a sword so quite simply a spear with a shortened shaft could quite quickly become what we now know as a leaf bladed sword. Now you might be thinking but Matt that's not really long enough to be a sword but again we don't know how long the thing that this was attached to. Imagine this was attached to a wooden section as long as the blade we've now got something which is long as a roman gladius or a machete so absolutely that could function as a sword. Moreover if we stick with the subject of stone here we also know that as with the makuhuitl for example stone or in that case obsidian but could have used flint for example or chert can be combined with wood to make a long chopping and piercing weapon and absolutely we know that this was done we know that they used forms of sickle for example where a series of blades were embedded in the edge of a piece of wood archaeologically we've got that remaining equally we know that again if we refer to anthropology we know that numerous cultures around the world took small blades we know that they were making blades in vast quantities we literally find them all over the ground here in Britain you can go field walking and pick up a dozen blades if you know where to go and you know what you're looking for so flint blades which were hugely manufactured in places where we had flint like in Britain and hugely traded all over Europe and obviously around the world could be embedded in wood in a series of different shapes and this has obviously got a strong parallel with the weapons that we find in Mesoamerica and South America particularly most famously the Aztec and the Inca so if you imagine some of those flint blades that we find all over the fields in Europe were embedded along the edge of a piece of wood hey presto you have a sword and not only that but they could be combined with a larger one so if you look at something like a spearhead a flint spearhead that could have been at one end of the weapon and then there could have been blades coming down and again we find parallels for this in not only in Mesoamerica with people like the Aztec and the Macuital and the kind of glaive polearm version of that but we even find it in some of the South Sea islands and not always stone as well sometimes teeth are used okay so famously shark teeth are used and if you use shark teeth or stone flint whatever all you're generally going to find archaeologically is the remains of those hard bits of material so you will find oh there's a bunch of shark teeth in the ground here or you'll find a bunch of flint blades which are often described as scrapers or as individual blades but you put those things together with a piece of wood or some other material bone horn antler holding the thing together again you have a sword very quickly and easily and when we're combining stone and wood i don't think it's any great leap of imagination to imagine that you end up with weapons that are the prototypes for what in the bronze age becomes some of the bronze age weapons we see um certainly we know that's kind of true with spears okay spear which is probably the weapon along with the bow or just the simple rock and the hand axe which go back the furthest okay and as soon as you're making spearheads it is really a very small jump to make something you can hold in your hand or potentially wear and carry more conveniently as a backup sidearm now one of the things that often gets overlooked is people think about stone artifacts metal artifacts and then if they know enough about stone artifacts they think about combining the stone or sometimes obsidian with wood but what they often overlook is looking at anthropological groups who were studied in the 19th and 20th centuries who don't even use stone who simply use wood and in fact even in places where they were using stone tools very often wooden weapons were seen as enough as good enough and so in the case of this Papua New Guinean staff here this is edged it is not just a club it has an actual edge to it and of course this is the same in places like Fiji and New Zealand various groups throughout our known history have used edged implements the aborigines of Australia as well and these are sometimes referred to as wooden swords if you have a hard wood or indeed if you can make the wood harder for example by heating it then you can put a pretty sharp edge on it and to some intents I would call this at a certain point of edginess I would call this a sword rather than a club because it's not purely a blunt impact instrument it's not just a club but it actually has an edge to focus the force now your definition of sword might vary you might say well Matt that's just an edged club it's not a sword but we're talking about semantics here at a certain point an edged implement like a boomerang can be classed as a type of sword and as we've seen when you combine something like this with stone and obsidian and start to edge the thing or indeed with shark's teeth then I think most people at that point concede that this is now a form of primitive sword so to conclude were there swords before the bronze age and I think the answer has to be yes if we rely on anthropology because if we look anthropologically at groups all over the pacific and south america north america as well bits of africa then we indeed find weapons which are analogous to swords but are made of non-metallic materials whether they're made of wood whether they're made of stone or obsidian or whether a combination of those things or indeed they could involve antler bone teeth these sorts of things so pre-metallic materials we absolutely know that they devised forms of sword in numerous different completely disconnected cultural and ethnic groups around the world and across history even up until modern history so I think it would be unreasonable of us to think that in the paleolithic mesolithic neolithic that there weren't some weapons made which we today would look at and go oh yeah that's a sword and it could be as I say it could be as simple as how they were probably making sickles a series of flint blades attached to a wooden blade and you know what would we find archaeologically the wood would be completely gone unless it happened to go into a bog or very specific situations like that for the most part we would find a series of flint blades in the ground or teeth in fact and what do we find archaeologically from this period loads and loads of flint blades and we don't really know even with axes in many cases we don't really know how those were attached to shafts wood or antler and we don't really know what form those shafts took so there we go something to mull over my belief is that the bronze age sword although as we see it here is very much a product of the bronze age in that case kind of late bronze age it was part of a tradition I don't think that swords came about purely in the bronze age I think there were probably weapons which took their place and occupied that space within combat and within personal kind of armament and self-defense and hunting in some cases in the stone age we just don't know what they looked like anyway what do you think do you think this is complete bs do you maybe know about any archaeological examples of the organic material that flint blades were attached to and some of these maybe maybe could have been sword types as I say I think we've got evidence for the sickles we've obviously got evidence of axe handles but when we get into spears it's a little bit more vague we don't really know how long those shafts were and this kind of stuff and in some cases a spear shaft could have been quite short so the weapon would have ended up being more akin to what we'd now call a sword rather than the spear anyway thanks a lot for watching and thanks once again to Robert for these absolutely this is just one of a few absolutely fantastic flint blades and artifacts and I hope I will see you back on the channel soon I have been Matt East and I will continue to be cheers folks thanks for watching we've got extra videos on patreon please give our facebook a like and subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks