Name: Would You Face a Bear With a Spear? Ancient Humans Might Have
Uploaded: undefined
Duration: undefined

NOVA

Archaeologists unearth traces of a 14,000-year-old struggle for survival — when early humans risked everything to hunt bears.

This form of bear hunting took nerves of steel.

Would You Face a Bear With a Spear? Ancient Humans Might Have

Carlisle Companies

Viking

NOVA Science Trust Logo

Archaeologists unearth traces of a 14,000-year-old struggle for survival — when early humans risked everything to hunt bears.

This form of bear hunting took nerves of steel.

Evolution

Would You Face a Bear With a Spear? Ancient Humans Might HavePublished: December 10, 2025ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Here, archeologists sift through the muddy layers of time to find out more about the risks these early people took to survive.You know when people talk about archeology?DUNCAN MCLAREN: Yes.ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: The back of a cave digging mud, this is the hard stuff.DUNCAN MCLAREN: One thing that has been found in a number of caves on the northwest coast is spear points in association with bare bones. And these date as far back as 13,000 years.ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: So is this one of these spear points?DUNCAN MCLAREN: This is a fragment of a spear point that was found in a cave not too far from here. We have uncovered a bone in the wall of this unit and it's 20 centimeters below the surface. And so I'm going to pull it and we'll see if it moves.ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: And we don't know what species it is or what bit of bone it is.DUNCAN MCLAREN: There's not enough here to know for sure, but it is a pretty big mammal.ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: It's a rib, isn't it?DUNCAN MCLAREN: So that could be a bear rib. It's probably most likely what it is because it's quite robust.ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Oh, amazing. What age do you think it is?DUNCAN MCLAREN: Well, we have some other samples from above where this bone is, and they're coming back around 14,000 years old.ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Okay, so it's old.DUNCAN MCLAREN: So it could be the same age or olderELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. One of the most wonderful things about archeology is that sometimes you uncover something that hasn't seen the light of day in thousands of years, and in this case, well, maybe 14,000 years.DUNCAN MCLAREN: Well, we're interested in where bears were hunted in the past. And in the winter when there's not as many resources around and people are feeling a bit hungry, knowing where there is a bear den is quite a valuable thing because you can come up there and dispatch the bear, you'll have a load of meat, fur, as well as bones.ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: One theory of how they hunted bears comes from studies of the native peoples of this region and North Asia in past centuries.DUNCAN MCLAREN: Essentially, a hunter would go with a party to a cave, smoke the bear out of the cave, and entice that bear to attack a single hunter. That hunter would be armed with a bracing spear. And a bear would come to take the hunter up in a bear hug, which is a common thing that they do. And the idea is a bear would take that hunter and essentially give them a good crushing. The hunter at the same time would brace the spear on the ground and aim it at the bear's heart. And so essentially the bear would take the hunter and the spear into the bear hug, thereby spearing itself through the heart.

United States

Northern Mariana Islands

Puerto Rico

American Samoa

Guam

U.S. Virgin Islands

U.S. Minor Outlying Islands

US & Territories

Colossal explosions shake a remote corner of the Siberian tundra, leaving behind massive craters. In Alaska, a huge lake erupts with bubbles of inflammable gas. Scientists are discovering that these mystifying phenomena add up to a ticking time bomb, as long-frozen permafrost melts and releases vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. What are the implications of these dramatic developments in the Arctic? Scientists and local communities alike are struggling to grasp the scale of the methane threat and what it means for our climate future. (Premiered February 2, 2022)

In the Arctic, enormous releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, threaten the climate.

Arctic Sinkholes

The top half of Jupiter in blue and green against a night sky

A composite image of Jupiter using images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt.

Explore the cosmos, delve into ancient history, and follow an extreme rescue with NOVA’s most-watched documentaries released in 2022.

NOVA’s most popular science documentaries of 2022

Four bright orange loops brand off of a dark blue blob

A transmission electron micrograph of HIV-1 virus particles (orange) replicating from the plasma membrane of an infected H9 T cell. Credit: NIAID, Flickr

Scientists have cured a handful of people of HIV by piggybacking on treatments they received for blood cancer. But does that bring a widespread cure any closer?

Would You Face a Bear With a Spear? Ancient Humans Might Have

Support Provided By

Explore More

Human: Into the Americas

Ancient Earth: Humans

Human: Neanderthal Encounters

Transcript

Credits

Support Provided By

Explore More

Human: Into the Americas

Ancient Earth: Humans

Human: Neanderthal Encounters