Remarkably well-preserved, very ancient wooden spears have been recovered from a coal mine in Schöningen, Germany (Thieme 1997). Found in a well-understood stratigraphic sequence, the spears are approximately 400,000 years old and range in size from 1.82 to 2.30 meters in length. These artifacts are thought to be spears, in part, on the basis of gross morphology (they have sharpened tips and certainly resemble more recent spears). Beyond this, all three spears were made the same way; each was produced from a spruce sapling with the harder, denser, and heavier wood from the base of the tree used for the spear tip which was sharpened. The butt ends of the spears taper gently and the balance point of each spear is located about one-third the spear length from the tip, just as it is in a modern javelin. Their form seems a clear indication that the spears were meant to be thrown and their size implies that large game animals were the target. Though the recent concensus has been that big game hunting was not a significanct part of subsistence until the evolution of anatomcially modern Homo sapiens, the 400,000 year old spears from Schöningen may lead to a reassessment of that belief.

 A remarkably early date associated with stone tools on the island of Flores in the western Pacific seems to indicate that Homo erectus was capable of crossing long stretches of water. Fission-track dating of flaked stone tools found at the Mata Menge site indicates an age in excess of 800,000 years (Morwood et al. 1998). Though some have questioned the artifactual designation, the authors maintain that along with patterned chipping, the tools exhibit a suite of wear patterns indicative of human use. When Homo erectus would have been moving out onto the islands east of Southeast Asia, there was a minimum of 19 kilometers of open water between Flores and the next island to the west, Sumbawa, which would have been separated by an additional 25 km of open water to Bali. If the dating is correct and if the tools are, indeed, tools, the reasonable inference is that Homo erectus was capable of navigating across more than 20km of water more than 800,000 years ago&emdash;750,000 years before the previous earliest evidence for navigation.

The Movius Line appears to have been breached by finds made by Huang Weiwen and Rick Potts in the Bose Basin in southern China (Gibbons 1998a). These researchers have unearthed bifacially flaked stone tools along the Youjiang River dating to more than 700,000 years ago. From their descriptions, the tools appear to me more like hand-axes than the choppers typical of east Asia. Thepresence of symmetrical bifacial tools may indicate that Homo erectus in eastern Asia was capable of producing tools as sophisticated as contemporaneous hominids in west Asia, Africa, and Europe.

 Richard Kay and his co-researchers at Duke University Medical Center have analyzed the hypoglossal canals of a number of crania of modern apes, extinct hominids, and modern human beings (Bower 1998). This feature at the base of the skull carries the hypoglossal nerve that controls tongue movement which, in turn, controls speech. Their research shows that the size (relative to the individual's mouth size) of the hypoglossal canal of modern humans is about twice the size of those of chimpanzees and gorillas. Australopithecines examined in the sample exhibit a hypoglossal canal size proportionally similar to those of the apes examined. On the other hand, 400,000 year old Homo specimens, 70,000 and 60,000 year old Neandertals, 90,000 year old anatomically modern Homo sapiens, and recent modern humans all have a similarly large hypoglossal canal. The researchers suggest that such a large, modern human-sized canal implies a similarly large nerve controlling the tongue. This may indicate that even archaic Homo sapiens may have possessed the ability to produce human-like speech.

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