Comments on: Early Bow and Arrows Offer Insight Into Origins of Human Intellect

By: Denise

Denise — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 21:00:44 +0000

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.

By: alex herrera

alex herrera — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 07:45:17 +0000

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.

By: Charle Scott

Charle Scott — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 19:20:51 +0000

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.

By: Rob Gargett

Rob Gargett — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 16:09:40 +0000

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!

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 02:14:00 +0000

Interesting!