The poison-tipped arrow is a trusty tool in the arsenal of any bow-based videogame protagonist. Whether it’s Link in the Zelda series or Alloy in Horizon, you can find a poisoned arrow if you look just a little bit. This, it turns out, is not too far from the truth, as new research suggests that humans were using poisoned weapons as far back as 60,000 years ago.
A study published in Science Advances reports that hunter-gatherers in southern Africa were poisoning their arrows somewhere around 58,000 BCE. That’s tens of thousands of years earlier than scientists had previously believed.
Those 60,000 years are significant since, before this discovery, the earliest evidence of poisoned weapons dated back to roughly 7,000 to 5,000 years ago. That was during the mid-Holocene era. This discovery pushes that timeline way back, however, into the era when modern humans were still figuring out how best to survive and thrive in the wilds.
The evidence comes from Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in present-day KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Researchers analyzed five quartz arrow tips found in sediment layers dated to about 60,000 years ago. Testing those tips, they identified chemical traces of two toxic alkaloids in buprenorphine and epibuphanisine, a pair of plant-derived compounds in the Amaryllidaceae family.
Based on those residues and historical records, the researchers believe the poison was likely made from Boophone disticha, a bulbous plant known locally as the poison bulb. Despite its sweet-smelling flowers, the plant contains compounds that can slowly weaken or kill animals. That’s a handy tool for hunters who could afford to be a bit more patient as they waited for the takedown.
Poisoned weapons require planning with a specific set of steps that need to be executed, so it’s almost certain that this wasn’t an accident. It requires experimentation and a deep understanding of the natural world. Hunters had to know which plans were toxic, how to extract the poison and preserve it, and how long the effects would take to kick in, and on which animals they worked best.
The study’s authors say that this kind of hunting demonstrates advanced abstract thinking and causal reasoning. Everyone, even humans from 60,000 years ago, easily understood how to overpower a creature with brute force. It takes careful study and observation to learn how to use a poison that works invisibly and over an extended period.
This discovery doesn’t just demonstrate how long humans have been using poisons to their advantage, but shows that we’ve been thinking several steps ahead for a lot longer than we thought.
