Narrowing Down When Humans Began Hurling Spears

sciencehabit writes "Archaeologists have long debated when early humans began hurling stone-tipped spears and darts at large prey. By throwing a spear, instead of thrusting it, humans could hunt buffalo and other dangerous game from a safe distance, with less risk of a goring or mauling. But direct evidence of this hunting technique in early sites has been lacking. A new study of impact marks on the bones of ancient prey shows that such sophisticated killing techniques go back at least 90,000 years ago in Africa and offers a new method of determining how prehistoric hunters made their kills."

Comments

Re:Brains are a funny thing

[hairyfeet]

What always fascinated me about history is how we would go through cycles when it came to tech, it seems we would advance to a certain point, some religion would come along and burn everything that didn't have (insert name of Deity) on it, the tech would be lost, only for us to slowly build ourselves back up.

I mean look at ancient Rome and Greece, you had theater, take out, taxis that charged by distance, steam power (mainly used for toys and tricks because slaves were cheaper) and they even used lithium for mental problems by sending them to the baths which had lithium dissolved in the water.

Sadly though as we have seen time and time again all it takes is the rise of a religion to wipe out centuries of tech, look at what Christianity did to the Roman Empire or what Islam did to the Arab world which frankly hasn't recovered to this very day. Neil Degrasse Tyson in one of his lectures points out how much of our advanced mathematics and astronomy came from the Arab world only for all innovation there to be wiped out in less than a century thanks to one of the mullahs declaring advanced math was "eeeevil!", probably because he couldn't understand it.