SFU archeology students and faculty faced off in a hunter-gatherer competition on Burnaby Mountain designed to separate the Homo sapiens from the chimpanzees.
About 30 undergrads, graduate students and professors threw spears, cracked nuts with rocks and tried to start a fire with hand tools in the university’s first-ever PaleOlympics.
Organized by Archeology Student Society president Brea McCauley, the event was designed to give students a chance to use Paleolithic tools, like the atlatl – a stone-age spear-throwing device.
“Last semester we did an atlatl-making workshop, and so then people were like, ‘Well, we want to chuck these around now,’” McCauley told the NOW, “so we were like, ‘Why don’t we make a full event out of it and do all these things that we’ve been learning about in our classroom environment and actually see how it would have been?”
Throwing spears at a Styrofoam mammoth and bison on one of the university’s athletic fields, students and faculty demonstrated their Paleolithic survival skills.
But a Venus-figure carving competition also tested their artistic side.
“That’s kind of what makes humans what they are today,” McCauley said of that more symbolic stone-age activity.
Prizes included evolutionary distinction and gift cards to a campus pub.
“Everyone’s going to be ranked in the human evolutionary tree, so first prize is going to be Homo sapiens – modern humans, second prize will be Neanderthals, third prize home erectus and down the evolutionary tree, and last place is going to be chimpanzee.”
The event was well received on campus, according to McCauley, and, in the future, she’d like to open it to students at other colleges and universities as well.
“I think that would be lots of fun,” she said.
