Archaeologists Find Oldest-Known 'Advanced Weaponry'

A team of archaeologists working in South Africa has discovered a hoard of 60,000-year-old arrowheads affixed with a surprising, and extra-fatal, security feature. The find was revealed in a study recently published in the journal ScienceAdvances.

Archaeologists Discover Oldest-Known Poison Arrowheads

Per the study, the remarkable discovery was made inside the Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter, located within the province of KwaZulu-Natal. They were made from quartz during the Pleistocene era and affixed with a dose of poison on the head itself, which indicates that human beings were constructing and utilizing "advanced weaponry" long before scientists previously believed.

The toxin used was derived from Boophone disticha (b. disticha), which is an extremely toxic flowering plant native to southern regions in Africa. Scientists have found this poison on similar arrowheads, albeit from thousands of years later, in South Africa and Egypt. Researchers say that the poison contained on the arrowheads was not potent enough to instantly kill prey. Instead, it slowed the hunters’ prey down and made the animal much easier to catch.

Weapons Displayed Surprising Amount of 'Cognitive Complexity'

Scientists said the arrows displayed a much higher level of “cognitive complexity” than they had expected from Pleistocene people, who endured many ice ages in a particularly brief and brutal lifetime. Prior to this discovery, the oldest arrowheads ever discovered were from the mid-Holocene period, aged between 4,000 and 8,000 years old.

“Understanding that a substance applied to an arrow will weaken an animal hours later requires cause-and-effect thinking and the ability to anticipate delayed results,” lead author Sven Isaksson, a professor of archaeological science at Stockholm University’s Archaeological Research Laboratory, told CNN. “The evidence points to prehistoric humans having advanced cognitive abilities, complex cultural knowledge, and well-developed hunting practices.”

'Finding Traces of the Same Poison...Was Crucial'

“This strengthens the view that the bow is not a late invention, but a fundamental and complex technology whose origins go back at least 80,000 years in Africa and Asia, and which later accompanied the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe around 54,000 years ago,” added Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and Paul Sabatier University who did not participate in the research.

“Finding traces of the same poison on both prehistoric and historical arrowheads was crucial,” Isaksson added. “By carefully studying the chemical structure of the substances and thus drawing conclusions about their properties, we were able to determine that these particular substances are stable enough to survive this long in the ground…It tells us something new about how people at that time thought, planned, and understood the world around them.”