“That was before bows and arrows.”
I really wonder about that. I’ve seen three and four year old children make bows and arrows out of household detritus. It’s hard to believe that no one figured it out back when it was so important.
Wrong sized game. Mammoths would have just shaken off arrows, it would have taken a hundred. It would require the deeper thrusting spear to make lethal wounds in a mammoth.
After the larger animals like sloths and mammoths were gone, spears became smaller so that they could be thrown instead of thrusted at smaller faster game. Then the Atlatl came along so the smaller spears could be thrown faster and further. Then finally along came the bows and arrows much much later.
Sometimes passed down traditional methods are hard to override with newer innovation so it is a long slow process. We can look around us today and see many cases of this very same thing still holding us back from certain new innovations. :)
It’s human nature to resist change...