Pike Use in Megafauna Hunting and Antipredator Defense: Historical Techniques and Paleolithic Research: Supplemental Material

This supplemental material is the primary dataset used for ethnohistorical analysis central to the 2026 Quaternary article entitled “Pike Use in Megafauna Hunting and Antipredator Defense: Historical Techniques and Paleolithic Research.” This cross-cultural, multi-species dataset consists of ethnographic and historical accounts of braced spear (pike) use against megafauna throughout the world spanning more than two millennia. It includes ancient Greek and Roman boar hunting and defense against charging warhorses, continuing through the early 20th century with Arctic and subarctic brown bear and polar bear hunting and defense, lion hunting and defense in east Africa, boar, bovid and leopard hunting in Eurasia and Africa, tiger hunting in Asia, and jaguar hunting in the Americas. These text excerpts and images were identified through Boolean and/or semantic searches of internet databases including the Internet Archive, Canadiana, Library of Congress, Google Books, eHRAF, Hathi Trust and various museum archives. These sources were digitized between the years 2000 and 2024.