Earliest hunters may have used pikes to impale larger animals

When it came to taking down giant animals, prehistoric hunters would quite literally have faced a mammoth task.

- Nicola Davis

Now researchers have shed fresh light on how they might have done it.

Experts studying sharp stone points made by the Clovis people, who lived in the Americas from about 13,000 years ago, say that rather than hurling spears at enormous animals such as giant bison, mammoths or ground sloths, the tribes could have planted their weapons point-up in the ground to impale charging creatures.