Spear
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Several million years ago, among our primitive ancestors who still walked on all fours, was an ape who figured something out about sticks. A long, solid pointy stick could penetrate the skin of an enemy, a predator, or prey at a distance. This sort of thinking caught on and became common. Eventually these primates worked out how to make sticks pointy and eventually figured out that fire could make the points harder and better at poking through stuff, and eventually that a triangular pointy rock tied to one end was even better than that. Thus is the origin of one of the oldest and most extensively used weapons in human history: the Spear, the first of the many types of weapons collectively known as pole-arms.
Spears in Warfare after the agricultural revolution
First off, a general fact. Spears are designed to do one thing: poking the enemy to death. They do this very well, but they are pretty poor at other things. If they run at you, or you run at them (or better still, are on a horse running at them) that momentum makes the poking all the more effective. Two handed spears can be longer, up to 7 meters. One handed spears leave the other free to hold a shield for better protection.
In melee combat on foot spears have one big advantage as far as weapons go: reach. With a spear you can attack your enemy from further away than you could if you had an axe or sword. Your blade, after all, is at the end of a shaft of wood at least a meter and a half long. However, if your enemy should get past the point of your spear and has a sword, mace, or axe, you are at a big disadvantage and are generally screwed. The best way around this fact is to gather up a bunch of spearmen and stand shoulder to shoulder, with more men behind you in case you miss. These formations can be very resistant to cavalry charges, turning them into horse kebabs. Another downside of spears is cumbersomeness. Spears are not good in confined spaces due to their length. That's why elite or well equipped spearmen usually carried short swords or daggers for when enemies come really close or their spear broke in the middle of battle (being made of mostly wood they tend to do this quite often).
Another important fact about spears is that they are dirt cheap. A perfectly adequate steel tipped spear could be made by a village blacksmith or farrier in about three hours. A good sword would take longer to forge, more iron and fuel to heat, and generally require a more skilled smith. If you want to raise a bunch of conscripts or militia and can't/don't want to pay a lot of money training and equipping them, a spear is your go-to weapon.
Unlike with swords, axes or bows, spear wielders benefit the most not from the personal skill, but from discipline, as their strength is usually in formation that prevent their foes from coming dangerously close. While technically spears are a hard counter to cavalry, medieval knight utterly pub-stomped undisciplined spear-armed militiamen, while similarly armed but heavily-drilled Italian and Swiss mercenaries with pikes royally buttfucked any heavy cavalry stupid enough to charge them.
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 target, 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, inflicting significant losses even on armored opponents.
Spears are often portrayed as being used overhand, meaning that if you point your fist outwards the tip is pointing down. This is not a good idea; it creates an incredibly unwieldy angle to use your weapon at, limits your thrusting strength and does not allow you to stab as far as an underhand grip.