How Deadly Were Prehistoric Weapons?

...animal in the Pleistocene that had to hide that tough, and if we can poke a hole in that, if you can poke a hole in that, we could have eaten anything, just like the Clovis people did. Right, so I've got my spear through it. Let's see what you can do. A glancing blow, you've slowed him. Got his feet. Try again. Scratched it. Do you want to show me how it's done, Andy? I'll give it a try. Oh my God. That's made a hell of a dent in this metal door. I hit it pretty cleanly, and you can see I just destroyed the end of my spear. It would have stuck in the hide of a mammoth or a mastodon. Yeah. The mammoth and mastodon, two of the mighty animals roaming this vast landscape. But little match for people with a weapon as deadly as the Clovis Point. Some think that these pioneers of the new frontier plunged into an orgy of slaughter, wiping out Ice Age animals like the mammoth. The evidence is questionable, but that image of the mighty hunter has stuck. Bear with me. Apparently it's quite distinctive when you see it. If you don't break an ankle on the way. Look, the secret to all of this, what those early metal workers were on the hunt for, is in this ribbon of black and white rock. It's very distinctive. See it? It's called cassiterite, a rock that contains tin. Britain had been a late comer to the Copper Age, but the discovery of local tin, a much rarer metal than copper, was to propel Britain to the very technological forefront of Europe. And if you were very lucky, you'd find something like this. I wish you could feel it. It looks like any ordinary pebble, but trust me, it's as heavy as a cannonball. And when you extract the tin itself, it's as beautiful as silver. And this is an ingot of tin. It's very lovely. They say that if you bend it, it crackles. They call that the cry of tin. But more importantly, if you have copper and you add this, you transform it into bronze. If you control the bellows speed, it'll hold the perfect temperature for casting. With just the right mixture of copper and tin, metal workers could create an alloy that was hard enough to make useful tools and weapons. OK, in you go. Bit lower. Fine water there. That's it. Well done, gentlemen. Look. Amazing. It's like blood. Better than blood. OK. That's good. Lift it up a little bit. That's it. Right there. Wow. It's so visceral, isn't it? Oh, definitely. The moment of truth. There we go. Behold. That is amazing. Look at the colour of it. You impressed? I'm very... I'm deeply, deeply impressed. Look at that. Yeah. It even makes a ring. It's a very hard piece of bronze. Just amazing. From liquid fire to a metal sword in a couple of minutes. There are clearly an awful lot of weapons around at this time, but I do wonder how many of them were for use and how many of them were for show, because there's very little evidence of actual violence, the sort of evidence that we've got from Thor Martin. Now, this shield might give us a clue, because it's very lovely, but a shield is supposed to be something that's for defence. This is made of metal that's only half a millimetre thick. It's beautiful, but it's absolutely useless. This shield was clearly for display only. But what about all the spears and swords of the time? Was their only purpose to make their owners look good? At Sheffield University, that theory has been severely tested. Sue Bridgeford's test rig consistently simulates the powerful slashing blows of one Bronze Age sword edge against another, and her results lead her to believe that these were indeed very violent times. We definitely have an impact. That is bowed and, I think, chipped, which is reasonably what you would expect, because this is actually a very hard edge, so it tends to be brittle and bits of metal do come off. Sue's test samples are made from bronze of the same composition as Bronze Age finds from Britain. And Sue's found evidence of identical damage on the edges of real Bronze Age weapons. Sue, I've always had the impression with beautiful bronze swords like this that they were mainly just for show rather than being used, but are you saying that you've got evidence that they have been used in anger? Oh, the evidence is on the swords themselves. As you can see, on the damage to the edge here, it's got a couple of tears there, but most of the thing is just a distortion of the blade. And is this the sort of evidence that you found on the experimental blades that you've made? Yeah, all the angled blows gave this sort of distortion. And those are the ones that you get most commonly when you're actually fighting with swords. How many of the swords that you've looked at have got this sort of damage? I've looked at about 600-odd swords and at least 50% have damage that is consistent with the experimental replication of how they would have been used in sword fighting, sword to sword. Do you think all Bronze Age weapons were probably used then? They weren't just made for show? I think a very small minority were used for show. The vast majority were made as serious weapons. They were used to kill people. There's something else we can find out about these weapons, where they were made, and for that we need to look at the composition of the bronze. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. There were around ten copper mining districts active in Bronze Age Britain and one of the most impressive is in North Wales. The rocky headland known as the Great Orm is riddled with the tunnels of ancient mines where the copper, unusually, is mildly radioactive. This is the malachite, the copper carbon, isn't it? The copper ore shines green in the rock. Tin, the other main ingredient of bronze, was found in Devon and Cornwall. Grains of heavy black tin ore can still be captured today by panning moorland streams. So what is the composition of our Thor Martin spearhead? What can it tell us? I took it to Oxford University's Department of Materials for assessment. Peter Northover will compare the chemical composition of our spearhead with a database of over 10,000 samples of ancient bronze to find out when our spearhead was made and where the raw materials came from. Peter and his colleagues have shown that, at different times in history, bronze has been made with varying ratios of copper and tin, as well as nickel, arsenic and other trace elements. They've also pinpointed the characteristic proportions of elements that identify different copper and tin mines across Europe. Low cobalt, so it's nothing to do with the south-west of England. He can now compare our spearhead with the samples in his database. The results tell a nice, coherent story. Pretty well tracking the object from when it was copper right to when it was a spearhead stuck in somebody's back. So how old is it? I think originally we're looking at something like 14th century BC. The other key point of the composition is two impurities, nickel and arsenic, which you can trace across quite a large part of north-west Europe, origin roughly eastern Switzerland, western Austria. You're talking about Switzerland, though? This seems bizarre, when you've got these huge copper mines here and they're bringing copper all the way from Switzerland. Certainly there is no way it could come from the Great Orm, because the Great Orm just doesn't have that level of nickel and arsenic in it. We believe the copper was mined and smelted in the eastern Alps, eastern Switzerland, western Austria, refined, made into bronze with tin, and then made into tools, weapons, ornaments, and then traded in stages across France, traded as scrap across the Channel, and then up to the Tormarten area. It may well have been made into a spearhead somewhere relatively close to Tormarten. So importing scrap bronze, not the actual copper then? Scrap bronze, rather than trading off into these damp and wind-sweat parts of the British Isles, just to buy some scrap from the guy down the road. So the bronze that ended up in the Tormarten spearhead came to Britain as scrap metal from mainland Europe about 1400 BC. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. In 1974, close to Dover Harbour, divers discovered the sunken wreck of a Bronze Age ship that was carrying over 60 kilos of well-worn bronze tools from France to be traded as scrap in Britain. So the people in Tormarten weren't living in isolation. They were part of a vast trade network that spread across Europe, a network that supplied scrap bronze to be reworked into fighting weapons.