The date when stone-age humans first invented
the lethal technology of spears and arrows has been set back many thousands of
years with the discovery of small stone blades dating to 71,000 years ago.
Archaeologists
believe the “bladelets” were used as the sharp tips for arrows or spears and
were made by a relatively sophisticated technique involving the heat treatment
of stone before shaping the final cutting edges.
The fine stone blades were excavated from a prehistoric site
called Pinnacle Point on the southern coast of South Africa and are between
6,000 and 11,000 years older than the previous oldest known samples of spear
and arrow blades, scientists said.
The discovery suggests that the invention of lethal projectile
weapons came far earlier in the course of human prehistory than previously
realised and that, once invented, the knowledge was passed down the
generations, according to a study in Nature led by Curtis Marean of Arizona
State University.
Previously, scholars thought that the technology of “projectile
weapons” was first invented about 60,000 years ago and then lost for many
thousands of years before being reinvented between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago.
“Every time we excavate a new site in coastal South Africa with
advanced field techniques, we discover new and surprising results that push
back in time the evidence for uniquely human behaviours,” Dr Marean said.
Arrows and spears were probably the key weapons that allowed
anatomically modern Homo sapiens to migrate out of Africa and successfully
colonise other parts of the world, including Europe where the Neanderthals
lived, he said.
“When Africans left Africa and entered Neanderthal territory
they had projectiles with greater killing reach and these early moderns
probably also had higher levels of hyper-cooperative behaviour,” he said.
“These two traits were a knockout punch. Combine them, as modern
humans did and still do, and no prey or competitor is safe. This probably laid
the foundation for the expansion out of Africa of modern humans and the
extinction of many prey as well as our sister species such as Neanderthals.”
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