South Asia now has the oldest evidence of bows and arrows outside Africa

Enlarge (credit: Langley et al. 2020)

For more than 100,000 years, the earliest humans hunted Pleistocene megafauna with wooden throwing spears. But by at least 64,000 years ago, people in Africa had invented a deadly new way to hunt: the bow and arrow. Bows and arrows eventually became a staple of hunting and warfare for cultures on five continents, but we're not sure exactly when or how that Paleolithic weapons proliferation took place.

Archaeologist Michelle Langley and her colleagues recently found an important clue in a Sri Lankan cave called Fa-Thien Lena: 130 bone arrowheads, dating to around 48,000 years ago. The discovery is the oldest evidence of bows and arrows ever found outside Africa. And it hints at how people adapted to survival in challenging new environments like the Arctic of Siberia, the high altitudes of Tibet, and tropical forests in Africa, Asia, and Melanesia. The invention of new technologies like this helped give Homo sapiens the edge we needed to conquer the world.

There are a number of ways that bow-and-arrow technology could have got to Sri Lanka," Griffith University Langley told Ars. It could have been brought from Africa with a traveling population. It could have been independently innovated in Sri Lanka. Or it could have been innovated in Africa (or elsewhere) and then brought along trade routes or social networks by word of mouth or an example being brought along. At the moment, we have no idea which!"

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