What’s so special about a 300,000-year-old stick stuck in the muck?

“It’s a stick, sure,” said Jordi Serangeli, an archaeologist from the University of Tübingen in Germany. But to dismiss it as such, he added, would be like calling Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon “only dirt with a print.”

That’s because the short, pointed piece of wood his team found in Schöningen, Germany, in 2016 may be the newest addition to the hunting arsenal used by extinct human ancestors during the Middle Pleistocene. It was probably a throwing stick that was hurled like a non-returning boomerang, spinning through the air before striking birds, rabbits or other prey.

Along with thrusting spears and javelins, it is the third class of wooden weapon discovered at the waterlogged site, occupied by either Neanderthals or their, and supposedly our, heavy-browed ancestors, Homo heidelbergensis.

When, in 1995, the Schöningen spears were discovered they pierced the debate over whether our early human relatives in Europe were simple scavengers incapable of crafting hunting tools. The throwing stick discovery adds to evidence that early hominins in our lineage were intelligent enough to prepare weapons and communicate together to topple prey. The paper was published Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution.