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Discovery: Hunters used poison on arrowheads around 60,000 years ago
2026-01-08 19:15:46 / MISTERE&KURIOZITETE
The use of poison in arrows marked a revolution in human hunting technology – new evidence suggests this happened tens of thousands of years earlier than previously known, according to Science Advances.
Researchers have found traces - of what appears to be poison extracted from plants - on small stone arrowheads from South Africa, dating back 60,000 years.
Scientists have long been fascinated by the development of poisoned hunting tools.
On the one hand, they may have improved our ancestors' game of gathering food.
On the other hand, they offer a window into cognition: poisoned tools represent a highly sophisticated technology that requires knowledge of how to extract poison from plants, how the poison affects prey, and how to exploit these effects to increase hunting efficiency.
Previously, the oldest direct evidence of poisoned weapons came from bone arrowheads in an Egyptian tomb dating back about 4,000 years and bone arrowheads from Kruger Cave in South Africa dating back about 6,700 years.
However, researchers had reason to suspect that the technology could be significantly older than that, because they had found much older bone and stone arrowheads that resembled the poisoned ones in size and shape.
But scientists had no direct evidence of poisoning in these older hunting tools.
In the study published today in Science Advances, Sven Isaksson of Stockholm University and colleagues report on microchemical and biomolecular analyses of residues found on 60,000-year-old quartz arrowheads from the Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
The analyses revealed toxic compounds from members of the Amaryllidaceae family of plants that are indigenous to Southern Africa.
The authors hypothesize that ancient people used secretions from the bulbs of Boophone disticha, an Amaryllidaceae species well known to have been used for arrow poison.
Isaksson and his colleagues said these poisoned arrows probably didn't kill their prey animals immediately.
Instead, they would have weakened the animals over time. Hunters would have had to track down wounded animals as they ran.
"Venom is an advanced adaptation for humans, and here we see it emerging at least 60,000 years ago," said Curtis Marean of Arizona State University, who was not involved in the new study.
He said the fact that the poison was found on microliths – small stone tools – is also significant.
The miniaturization of stone tools was another key advance for humans, which helped develop bow and arrow technology.
According to Marean, the new discovery raises the question of whether the development of microlith technology is related to the development of poison.
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