Editing Spear (section)

===Spears at Long Range===
So far this has all been about spears as melee weapons. Spears can also be thrown, though for best results you usually need specialized spears. Thrown spears (or '''Javelins''') are typically shorter and lighter than melee spears, but heavier than arrows. They don't have the same speed or range, but since they are heavier they can make quite an impact. Regular one-handed spears while not designed for it, could be thrown too, though at far less distances, and throwing your main close combat weapon at enemy is usually a bad idea, unless he retreats or is a giant hulking elephant you don't want to face in melee.

Notable users of throwing-spears were Roman legionnaires, whose ''pila'' were specifically engineered to sink into a shield, bend at the long, flexible barbed tip to make removal just about impossible, and then detach from their handles. This served the three-fold purpose of making the ''pilum'' unusable for the enemies thus attacked, ruining any shields they happened to sink into, and being nearly impossible to treat without heavy surgery off the field, and these were the days before penicillin, meaning you were more likely to die of infection even if the surgery went well. For these reasons Pila were effective at inflicting significant losses even on armored opponents.

Other famous throwing spear users were the Aztecs who used the ancient atlatl to throw stone-tipped spears with enough force to penetrate Spanish steel mail or brigandine armor. There is some evidence that Ice Age humans who first developed atalatls in the region could use them to penetrate into the armoured hides of glyptodonts (basically really big armadillos), resulting in an extinction overkill event for the large mammals. The people of the Iberian peninsula were also famous historically for the use of javelins, and even kept using them from horseback to some degree while absolutely everyone else was shooting guns while mounted instead. Native Americans also used these. Ancient Greeks and Romans had leather straps called an amentum as a similar throwing device. Many throughout history experimented with better ways to throw spears.