2023-11-18 05:00:06
The hunter-gatherers who settled on the banks of the Haine, a river in southern Belgium, 31,000 years ago, already used thrusters to hunt. This is the conclusion of a study carried out at the TraceoLab of the University of Liège (The University of Liège is a university in Belgium located in…).
The materials discovered at the Maisières-Canal archaeological site attest to the use of this hunting technique 10,000 years before the oldest preserved propellers currently known. Published in the journal Scientific Reports, this discovery leads archaeologists to reconsider the age of this major technological innovation.
Combination of impact traces on an archaeological artifact identified as a propellant dart thanks to experiments.
Credit: TraceoLab/ULiège
The thruster is a weapon designed to launch darts, large arrow-like projectiles usually measuring over two meters. These thrusters can project darts up to 80 meters away.
The invention of long-range hunting weapons has had significant consequences on human evolution, changing hunting practices, the dynamics between humans and their prey, and diet (For order diets cultural practices by Man see practice…) and the (An organization is) social organization of groups of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. The date of their invention and their diffusion (In common parlance, the term diffusion refers to a notion of…) has therefore long been the subject of lively debates within the scientific community (A scientist is a person who devotes himself to the study of a science or sciences and who…).
“Until now, it was notoriously difficult to detect ancient weapons at archaeological sites, because they were made of organic components that are rarely preserved,” explains Justin Coppe, a researcher at TraceoLab. “Stone points, which armed ancient projectiles and are much more frequently encountered in archaeological digs, have been difficult to reliably associate with specific weapons.”
Examples of experimental spears and javelins armed with replicas of archaeological flint points.
Credit: TraceoLab/ULiège
Most recent claims regarding the early use of thrusters and bows in Europe and Africa relied exclusively on the size of projectile points to link them to these weapon systems. However, ethnographic reviews and experimental tests have seriously challenged this reasoning by showing that arrowheads, darts, and spearheads can vary greatly in size, with overlapping ranges.
The innovative approach developed by TraceoLab archaeologists combines ballistic analysis (Ballistics is the science which aims to study the movement of projectiles.) and mechanics (In everyday language, mechanics is the field of machines , engines, vehicles, organs…) of the fracture (In traumatology, the term fracture designates by definition a solution of…) to better understand the traces preserved on the flint points. “We conducted a large-scale experiment in which we fired replicas of Paleolithic projectiles with different weapons such as spears, bows and arrows. thrusters”, explains Noora Taipale, FNRS research fellow at TraceoLab.
Christian Lepers preparing for a thruster shot during the experiment carried out at TraceoLab.
Credit: TraceoLab/ULiège
“By carefully examining the fractures on these stone points, we were able to understand how each weapon affected the fracturing of the points when they impacted the target.” Each weapon left distinct marks on the stone points, allowing archaeologists to match these marks to archaeological finds. It’s a bit like identifying a gun from the marks the barrel leaves on a bullet, a practice known to forensic science.
The excellent match between the experimental propellant sample and the Maisières-Canal projectiles confirmed that the fighters occupying the site used these weapons. This discovery encourages archaeologists to further apply the method to discover the real antiquity of long-range weapons. Future work at TraceoLab will focus on adjusting the analytical approach to other archaeological contexts to achieve this goal.
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