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We know poison-coated arrows were used 60,000 years ago to stun larger prey and enable hunters to get close enough to complete the kill.
Stanley Kubrick’s mesmerising film 2001: A Space Odyssey opens with a scene in which two rival hominin tribes meet and threaten each other at a waterhole. The ritualistic encounter turns deadly when one of the apes picks up a bone and uses it to kill a rival. Kubrick (and Arthur C Clarke, on whose novel the film was based) attributes this key evolutionary step – the invention of weaponry – to brain waves implanted by a mysterious black slab – a reference to the enduringly popular idea that human innovation results from our being visited and mentored by aliens. In the real world, archaeology can inform us more reliably on the invention and use of weapons in prehistory.
Handaxes are known to date back c.1.76 million years, but these are multi purpose tools, not necessarily used to kill. Arrowheads have a less ambiguous purpose. Some of the oldest examples discovered so far come from Sibudu Cave, located 40km north of Durban in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, a World Heritage Site of great importance for the understanding of the emergence of early Homo sapiens in Africa and the development of tools.
We have previously reported on the evidence from this cave of the pioneering use 77,000 years ago of aromatic leaves with insecticidal properties to create pest-free bedding, though developments in dating technology now suggest that the earliest use of such bedding dates from 200,000 years ago at Border Cave, also in KwaZulu-Natal.
Among the other finds from the Sibudu rock shelter – in addition to the early arrowheads of stone (64,000 years old) and of bone (61,000 years old) – are bow strings made of plant fibre and evidence for the use of beeswax and tree-sap glue to attach the arrowhead to the shaft. Use-wear analysis of the flint surface and experimental archaeology both confirm that the arrowheads were used for killing small animals.
We also know (as reported in CWA 136) that poison-coated arrows from a third rock shelter in KwaZulu-Natal appear to have been used some 60,000 years ago to stun larger prey and thus enable hunters to get close enough to complete the kill. That finding was published in the Science Advances journal in January 2026 (https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adz3281) in a paper that, in the words of co-author Marlize Lombard of the Palaeo Research Institute at the University of Johannesburg, was evidence that ‘our ancestors in southern Africa not only invented the bow and arrow, but also understood how to use nature’s chemistry to increase hunting efficiency’.
Responding to these reports, Professor Anders Hogberg from the Department of Cultural Sciences at Linnaeus University in Sweden has said that the use of bows and arrows and of arrow poison ‘requires planning, patience and an understanding of cause and effect. It is a clear sign of advanced thinking in early humans’. Some scientists have argued that knowledge of bow-and-arrow technology was a vital evolutionary development that enabled Homo sapiens to survive as they spread from Africa into western and eastern Eurasia.
Hunting hypotheses
Another recent study challenges the belief that our ancestors threw their spears at their prey while hunting. Rather than using spears as projectiles, which requires both strength and skill, ancient humans might have wedged one end of the weapon into the ground, a technique that uses the weight and speed of the charging animal to impart more than ten times greater force than can be achieved with a spear thrust.
In a paper published in the journal PLOS One (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0307996), lead author Scott Byram, of UC Berkeley’s Archaeological Research Facility, argues that ethnographical evidence and cave art show that people hunted with planted spears throughout much of the world in the past.
To evaluate their braced-pike hypothesis, the Berkeley team used a replica spear tipped with a Clovis point to test how it would respond to the simulated force of an approaching animal. The spear tip was found to be as effective as a modern-day bullet, capable of inflicting serious wounds on predators and prey.
‘The kind of energy that you can generate with the human arm is nothing like the kind of energy generated by a charging animal. It’s an order of magnitude different’, said co-author Jun Ueno Sunseri. In the coming months, the team plans to further test its theory by building a replica mammoth to simulate the impact of a planted Clovis-tipped pike on a massive, fast-moving mammal.
Experimental archaeology can be used with equal force to demonstrate the opposite theory, however, and there are many cave paintings showing human figures brandishing spears. In a paper published in Scientific Reports (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37904-w) on the ballistics of Pleistocene hand-thrown spears, academics from the UCL Institute of Archaeology in London reported on their experiments with throwing replica javelins.
These were modelled on the Schˆningen spears, found, along with a large collection of bones from slaughtered animals, in an open-cast lignite mine in Germany in the 1990s. It is estimated that they are 200,000 years old, which qualifies them as the oldest known complete wooden weapons so far discovered, and it is most likely that they were made by Neanderthals.
Six javelin athletes were recruited to see how far the replica spears could be thrown. The results showed that the weapons could hit a target at a range of 20m with enough force to kill a large animal. Dr Matt Pope, who co authored the paper, said: ‘the emergence of weaponry – technology designed to kill – is a critical but poorly established threshold in human evolution. Understanding when we first developed the capabilities to kill at distance is therefore a dark, but important, moment in our story’.
Shaping landscapes
Hunting with spears is one way to gain your food, but the injuries sometimes found on ancient human remains indicate that big-game hunting was not without its physical risks. Much easier, then, to catch fish, as the predecessors of the Mayan people of Belize worked out 4,000 years ago. In a paper on large-scale fisheries in the pre-Columbian Maya Lowlands (published in Scientific Reports: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adq1444), a team led by Eleanor Harrison Buck of the Department of Anthropology, University of New Hampshire, reports on the remarkable discovery of a distinctive pattern of zigzag linear canals running for several miles through a large area of wetland Belize, in Central America.
The canals were identified using Google Earth imagery and mapped using drones. The team then excavated a stretch of ancient canal at the Crooked Tree wildlife sanctuary. Concluding that the canals were used to channel and trap freshwater fish species, the team found numerous barbed points used to spear and catch prey.
This large-scale modification of the landscape by semi-nomadic hunter gatherer-fishers in the Yucat·n coastal plain was found to pre-date the period when the Maya began to settle in permanent farming villages. The fish-trapping canals continued to be used during the so-called ‘Formative’ times (approximately 2000 BC to AD 200) that saw the rise of the pre Columbian civilisations of Mesoamerica. The authors of the report say that ‘the early intensification of aquatic food production offered a high value subsistence strategy that was instrumental in the emergence of Formative period sedentarism and the development of complexity among pre Columbian civilizations like the Maya’.
Meanwhile, a paper in Antiquity (https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.40) argues that we are wrong to think of architecture as the exclusive product of settled hierarchical communities and of societies with developed power structures, headed by an elite class able to command large numbers of labourers to construct their monuments. Luis Flores-Blanco, of the University of California, Davis, and Mark Aldenderfer, of the University of California, Merced, have attributed the construction of a collection of monumental burial mounds at Kaillachuro, in the Titicaca Basin of the Peruvian Andes, to egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups ‘without institutionalised inequality’.
Using radiocarbon dating, they show that the nine stone mounds, covering masonry burial chambers, were constructed about 5,300 years ago, some 1,500 years earlier than other monumental architecture in the Andean region ‘constructed as a space of elite power’. The researchers theorise that Kaillachuro’s mounds developed gradually through ongoing acts of burial ritual and remembrance tied to the community’s ancestors. The study argues that memory of the dead did not remain merely symbolic or intangible: it became manifest in a materially visible architectural form that not only shaped the landscape, but also influenced the practices of the living.
Chris Catling is an archaeologist and writer, fascinated by the off-beat and the eccentric in the heritage world.
