Posted on 08/11/2020 12:50:46 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Some of the earliest solid evidence of poison use is traces of the highly toxic compound ricin on 24,000-year-old wooden applicators, found in South Africa's Border cave. However, archaeologists have long suspected this hunting technique is much older, and new evidence now suggests humans have been shooting poison arrows through the last 72,000 years.
In a new study, archaeologist Marlize Lombard from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa examined the unique properties of known poison arrows, comparing them to those that don't rely on poison, by analysing 128 bone pointed arrows.
Arrows that don't use poison need to deeply pierce the bodies of prey to effectively kill or incapacitate, whereas those laced with poison just need to stab through an animal's skin to access its bloodstream.
Using a measurement called the tip cross-sectional area (the part of the arrowhead important for both cutting into prey hide and the arrow's flight dynamics) allowed Lombard to compare arrows through time. She focused her study on bone-tipped arrows because a lot of previous work looked only at stone-tipped arrows, given more of these have been preserved.
Lombard then assessed 306 Late Stone Age bone-point arrows, for these established properties.
Six of the bone-pointed arrows dated as far back as 72,000-80,000 years, from the Blombos Cave in South Africa. Three of these arrows have properties consistent with poisoned arrowheads....
The sample size for the oldest arrows is small, and Lombard cautions that such a metric approach to weapons function can only tell us what the weapon had the potential to achieve, rather than the way they were actually used...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencealert.com ...
The Cro-Magnon’s secret weapon against the Neandertals?
Yikes!
Killing always a priority for our species. The Old Testament was right.
Who broke my heart? You did, you did…
Sherlock Holmes would be proud.................
You know, they keep labeling them as arrows. 70K ago they were actually more than likely to be Atlatl Darts rather than arrows.
“Arrow” and “Aero”...kinda neat if their word origins are somehow connected. Hmmm, maybe I’ll just look it up.
You beat me by 17 seconds. Good job.
It’s amazing that no one ever used them against other people, until white guys in America did...
....had the potential to achieve
Ah, echos of high school guidance counselors....good times
Cupid is fully armed......
The San—in recent times when they still hunted—used poison arrows. And the Border Cave people are supposed to be ancestors of the San.
But who knows?
70,000 years with no “Arrow Control Laws”? We need to (retroactively) close the “Arrow Show Loophole.”
Wouldn’t a poison arrow/spear kill both the “eatee” as well as the “eater”?
The Point...
Somewhere I think I still have a copy of that movie on vhs, and 2 copies of the original album.
An old favorite, 1st time I heard it was on a Beaumont radio station in 1973 about 6AM. Ringo Starr narrated the movie, while Nilsson narrated the album. Almost identical words in both narrations, Ringo varied very little, only a word or two here and there. I think I lost the cartoon book that came with the original album though...
Oblio and his faithful dog Arrow...never could decide if my favorite song was “Me and My Arrow” or “Are You Sleeping”...whole thing from end to end is great.
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