Today it seems obvious: Dip a sharp object in a poisonous substance, and then use that weapon to take down your prey. But when did human beings figure out this deadly strategy?
It remains as mysterious as the dawn of setting fires, building wheels and painting on caves. But a new study pushes back the timeline of this innovative hunting technique by tens of thousands of years.
Researchers led by Sven Isaksson, a professor of archaeological science at Stockholm University, have discovered poison residues on 60,000-year-old arrow tips unearthed in South Africa. With the next-oldest trace of poison use dated to 35,000 years ago, these tips preserve the earliest evidence of poisoned weapons by a wide margin.
“It’s a big leap,” Dr. Isaksson said of the discovery, which was published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
“It might be an even earlier practice,” he added. “This is just the earliest evidence so far.”
The finding reinforces existing evidence that early Homo sapiens had cognitive abilities nearing the sophistication of our own. That’s because in order to tip an arrow with poison, hunters needed knowledge of local plants and their effects, as well as the ability to craft special weapons with the right dosages.
“It is always worth going back and taking another look,” Dr. Langley said. “Especially as our techniques get better and cheaper and faster, people can at least look for things in the tiny little crevices and cracks where maybe something has been kept all those years.”
She also noted that the identification of these poison-tipped weapons added to a growing body of evidence that our human ancestors 60,000 years ago — and even earlier — were cognitively on par with modern humans.
“I’m not surprised that they found this,” Dr. Langley said. “It’s just building on everything that’s come before it, and really substantiating that the people 60,000 years ago were as complex as we are today
