November 7, 2012
Early Bow and Arrows Offer Insight Into Origins of Human Intellect
Small stone blades from South Africa dating to 71,000 years ago may be the earliest evidence of bow and arrows. Image: Simen Oestmo
The bow and arrow is an ancient weapon—going back at least 71,000 years, a study published in Nature suggests. Archaeologists working at South Africa’s Pinnacle Point cave site uncovered a collection of tiny blades, about an inch big, that resemble arrow points, likely belonging to prehistoric bow and arrows or spear-throwers. The researchers say the discovery is further evidence that humans (Homo sapiens) started to act and think like modern people early in their evolution.
The skeletons of H. sapiens appear in the fossil record by about 200,000 years ago in Africa. But when modern culture and cognition emerged is still an open question. Some anthropologists think the human brain evolved in tandem with the rest of the body, and culture built up slowly over time as technology advanced. Others have suggested there was a disconnect between physical and behavioral modernity, with some sort of genetic mutation roughly 40,000 years ago causing an abrupt change in how humans think. Still other researchers argue that incipient signs of advanced intellect appear early in the archaeological record but then disappear for thousands of years before reappearing. Needless to say, there’s a lot of debate on this subject. (For a detailed discussion on the topic, check out the story I wrote in June for Smithsonian.com).
Kyle Brown of the University of Cape Town and his colleagues say the tiny blades that they found are signs of complex tool making. The tiny tools were created from silcrete stone that people had heated over a fire to make the raw material easier to work with before chipping the rock into blades. This suggests people had to follow a lengthy multi-step process to make the blades, which included gathering the stones, gathering fuel for the fire, heating the rocks and carefully cutting the stone into delicate blades. The shape of the blades looks like the shape of arrow tips found in more recent arrows, which led Brown and colleagues to conclude the blades were used in bow-and-arrow projectile weapons. That implies there were even more steps in the tool-making process, such as hafting the stone tips to a wooden shaft.
The blades aren’t the only evidence that humans had advanced cognitive abilities as early as 71,000 years ago. Pigments, jewelry and other art found in South African cave sites dating to as many as 164,000 years ago suggest that early humans were capable of abstract or symbolic thinking. Some researchers view this ability as central to human intellect.
The new study, however, goes one step further. The researchers say the blades were found throughout a geological section of Pinnacle Point that spans roughly 11,000 years (71,000 to 60,000 years ago), indicating people could communicate complicated instructions to build intricate tools across hundreds of generations. This instance of long-term maintenance of a cultural tradition early in human history is evidence that the capacity for modern culture began early and slowly built up, Brown and colleagues say. Previous suggestions that complex culture came and went in the early days of humans is probably an artificial result, they say, because so few African sites have yet been excavated.
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Interesting!
Hi, Erin. Pinnacle Point is quite an amazing archaeological locality. And the excavators, Brown and Marean, are doing excellent work. I know that it’ll sound a bit like sour grapes, however, for years now there have been those who question not the finds, but the age estimates of these and other southern African sites. Like those at Pinnacle Point, the spectacular finds derive from caves, where organic preservation is often enhanced either by protection from the elements or the chemistry of the cave environment, or both. Unfortunately, for those parts of the site that are beyond the radiocarbon limit—around 40,000 years—the excavators have relied on less precise dating techniques. One in particular, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), begins with the assumption that a given grain of quartz sand was exposed to sunlight for a time before final burial in the cave. Where caves are concerned this assumption is an untenable assumption, because no one is able to say ahead of time, with any certainty, that a single grain was or wasn’t exposed to sunlight sufficiently powerful or for long enough. As a result, once the technique has yielded its raw results, there follows a complex mathematical dance based on all sorts of other assumptions, as a means of ‘eliminating’ the uncertainty of whether or not a given quartz grain had been sufficiently exposed to sunlight. Moreover, if the mathematical assumptions and the inherent complexity of the calculations are going to be in error they’ll always overestimate the time since that quartz grain (and the artifacts in proximity that are of interest) was last exposed to sunlight. Logically, there’s no under-estimating ages in caves using OSL. This leaves us with a question, one that I think the excavators of Pinnacle Point and elsewhere cannot logically escape. If the dates of unequivocally modern human behavior elsewhere in the world are less than about 45,000 years old, what are the odds that the anomalously early dates for similar behaviour in those southern African sites—all dated by OSL—are systematically overestimating their age? I’d say those odds were far better than the likelihood that all of the finagling involved in arriving at an OSL age estimate is yielding accurate and precise chronometric results. KUTGW!
More and more my thinking in my book The Knots of Time at Amazon.com comes into place. The assertion that these early people made bows and arrows is easy to say. The Atlatl and dart require even more thought and would leave the same evidence as you have found. I noticed no Bows were found and no mention of the changes to the arm in humans that use a bow even today. These people in my Book The Knots of Time at Amazon.com worshiped the Sun for all those years and those sites would reflect this if looked at as worshipers of the Sun. The bow came from the bow drill first and the banner stones of latter were counter weights on these bow drills and were never attached to the Atlatl’s. Thank you for your time Chareles David Scott.
Hi there. I don’t know enough about archaeology to be able.to cast any doubt about your article. However, I have found many, many of these exact (excluding stone composition) type tools along lake beds, both long-time dry and deep-water holding lakes in the California’s. In Clearlake (Northern California) I found them alongside, and below and above arrowheads of the classic design, both large and small.
In the dry lake bed fringe of Lake Chapala in Baja California, I found so many right at the cement-like lake bed’s edge that it appeared as if they had been sprinkled about.
Curiously enough, I found complete arrowheads of the classic shape, made of quartz crystals, at this site.
My wandering point is that I think what you have are simple scraps of stone that were fashioned into cutting implements. To my uneducated eye, and with limited flintknapping experience, the telltale full-length ridge that is apparent in the pictured specimens, is ubiquitous. to most shards as they fall away from the larger worked material. But what do I know? Or as the attending physician said at my birth, and I quote, “WTF?!”
Have a nice day, ya’ hear.
I am an archaeologist and I agree that the tools do not look like arrowheads. Arrowheads do not have ridges and they are bifacially worked. There also does not appear to be any evidence of hafting. The pictured tools instead look like unifacial flake tools such as scrapers or denticulates. As far as dating goes, there are usually such huge large error bars that it seems difficult to believe they could accurately pinpoint an 11,000-year range for these artifacts.