Arrow heads at Obi-Rakhmat (Uzbekistan) 80K years ago?

> being shot with a modern laminated bow (36 lbs) on a complete uneviscerated carcass of a small ungulate hung in anatomical position in order to start documenting impact breakage and microscopic linear impact traces for the shape and raw material under study

They were thorough…

Short story: stones were used to make “arrow-heads” (blades on sticks too small for spears) 25k years earlier than expected.

The paper does not appear to distinguish between 'darts' used with atlatl throwing sticks, and arrows used with bows. Darts were used before bows.

(projectile point design is difficult; you can't haft archaic and yeet it too)

wow!

uber ancient stone tool geeks working diligently to elucidate EXACTLY how evidence of knaping and the wide variety of wear and damage occured.

personaly I have some small collections of lithic tools and several microscopes, including a specimin scope, the last is adictive to use on a wide variety of objects, as a whole world of detail leapes into view that is otherwise just at the edge of naked eye visibility, vs 1000x microscipy that is otherwise invisible and requires painstaking attention, sample preperation and record keeping. so between modern experiments to recreate such tools, and then show how they flake, chip/wear and respond to heat and other forces, and verrify these things exactly, we get a wide variety of information about how the makers of the archialogical examples lived, as this is one of the only windows into there lives, knowing the invariable angles that certain types of stone chip, and at what pressure, gives us body size , position, grip strength, production times(value), and much more. and so they craft weapons and tools and abuse lightly damaged road kill in the search for squeezing a bit more data from the archioligical lithic and bone evidence. A general level of skilled research that might become more relevant in determining what actualy constitutes real evidence in the age of mass produced 'data'

Civil war between Atlanteans.