Sapiens has fashioned more and more powerful weapons, capable of defeating all types of game.
Prehistory, Upper Palaeolithic. Homo sapiens sheltering from the cold in a cave. Painting by Francisco Fonollosa.
This article is taken from n°204 of Indispensables de Sciences et Avenir, dated January/March 2021.
While giant mammals were legion on all continents 125,000 years ago, they almost all disappeared as our ancestors progressed on Earth. Archaeological evidence attests that these animals were well hunted.
We have to wait - 30,000 years to see the assegai and the harpoon appear
A widespread practice long before the arrival of Sapiens:the oldest projectiles fitted with stone points date back 500,000 years, the oldest wooden arrow, found in Germany, 400,000 years old… Remains of yew spears dated 150,000 years have been found near the remains of woolly rhinoceros or deer, but it was not until the Gravettian, i.e. - 30,000 years, to see the appearance of the assegai and the harpoon, with removable points often made of reindeer antler, then preponderant game. At the same time, the invention of the propellant made it possible to catapult throwing weapons stronger and further, and to defeat mammoths or Siberian unicorns (giant rhinos).
Sometimes fragile weapons
In 2018, an international team led by Francesco d'Errico, researcher at the Pacea laboratory (CNRS/University of Bordeaux), published in the journal Antiquity an article suggesting that in South Africa, Sapiens used small bows and arrows with carved bone tips to hunt 61,000 years ago. Prior to this work, the oldest known trace of such technology dated back to the end of the Late Paleolithic in Europe - 10,000 years ago. According to the authors, not very powerful and fragile, these weapons were mainly used to hunt game of modest size, with the aim of injuring the animal or administering poison to it.
By Vincent Bordenave