Poison-Laced Arrows Date Back Tens of Thousands of Years Earlier Than Expected

When you think of critical developments in human technology, chances are that things like farming or the wheel come to mind. New research, however, highlights a more niche stepping stone—poison.

In a study published today in the journal Science Advances, a team of researchers reveals that hunter-gatherers in southern Africa poisoned their arrow tips around 60,000 years ago. The findings show that this development happened tens of thousands of years earlier than previously believed. Until now, there was no evidence of poison weapons older than the mid-Holocene, roughly 7,000 to 5,000 years ago.

A plant-based poison

The team, including co-author Sven Isaksson, a professor of archaeological science at Stockholm University, found remains of poison derived from plants on five quartz arrow tips in an archaeological site in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, called Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter. Linnaeus University’s Anders Hogberg and the University of Johannesburg’s Marlize Lombard were also co-authors of the paper.

The arrow came to light in a layer of sediments dating to 60,000 years ago, suggesting the artifact is just as old. Namely, the researchers identified residue from buphandrine and epibuphanisine, two alkaloids—a group of organic compounds—from local members of the flowering plant family Amaryllidaceae.

According to the team, hunter-gatherers in southern Africa probably created the poison from an extract of Boophone disticha, a bulbous plant that produces sweet-smelling flowers, known as poison bulb by locals. The suggestion is based on the fact that 18th-century historical records mention the poison bulb’s application in historic arrow poisons.

An important step for humans

The use of poison to hunt was a significant development for hunter-gatherers. The approach consisted of a simpler way to kill animals, and its use means that these communities were wielding big brain power—the strategy necessitated a “mental encyclopedia of poisonous plants” at their disposal, as described by an American Association for the Advancement of Science statement. What’s more, people would have needed to predict how an animal would act in response to the poison, whose effect isn’t instant. By 60,000 years ago, only modern humans existed in southern Africa, so this research almost certainly pertains to our species: Homo sapiens.

The prey would have lost strength slowly, and hunter-gatherers from this period most likely comprehended the poison’s timing, improving their persistence hunting with that information. Persistence hunting is a hunting strategy that consists of following prey to exhaustion.

“Because poison is not a physical force, but functions chemically, the hunters must also have relied on advanced planning, abstraction and causal reasoning,” the authors wrote in the study.