In May researchers reported the discovery of the world’s oldest arrowheads, on the east coast of present-day South Africa. Some 60,000 years ago, at a time when other Stone Age people were heaving spears at their prey, the members of a culture known as Howiesons Poort were setting their weapons aloft with a bow, 20,000 years before the bow and arrow caught on for good. Archaeologist Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa first uncovered the bone tools two years ago, at the mouth of Sibudu Cave. Wadley’s colleague Lucinda Backwell immediately noticed a striking resemblance to the arrowheads fashioned by Late Stone Age, Iron Age, and Bushman cultures, all of which flourished much later.
Using a microscope, Backwell could see traces of the stone used to whittle a pinkie-size arrowhead into a highly symmetrical point. Bone is ideally suited to arrowheads, she says, because it ...
