<< News >> Archaeologists get to the point
Submitted by coldrum on Sunday, 21 January 2007 Page Views: 1524
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Call it CSI: Stone Age, an archaeological investigation of how ancient flint arrowheads left their mark on some very old bones. The trauma caused by these arrows may be a clue in the scholarly mystery of whether warfare existed in the centuries before recorded history, says the team led by archaeologist Martin Smith of the UK's University of Birmingham. "Finds of embedded projectile points are not uncommon" in bones from the late Stone Age, or Upper Paleolithic, about 10,000 to 40,000 years ago, the team says in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
While archeologists have long examined butchering marks and rock bashes left in bones, identifiable signs of the glancing blows of arrows, prehistory's weapon of choice, had heretofore been lacking. That's because archaeologists didn't know what to look for, Smith and colleagues suggest. So, they decided see for themselves what sort of wounds flint arrowheads leave behind.
"Recognizing wounds has been a problem for archaeologists," says anthropologist John Shea of Stony Brook (N.Y.) University, who was not part of the study. "The study will be very helpful. It is a superb example of experimental archaeology."
Making their own Stone-Age yew bows and flint-tipped arrows, Smith's team looked through a microscope at the damage caused by firing their replicas into pig and cattle ribs and shoulder bones. Flint arrowheads leave distinctive beveled puncture wounds and stone fragments likely to be detectable in fossils, they found. Such fragments turn up in a the 4,000- year-old spine of a woman buried in England's Feizer Cave archaeological site.
Most surprisingly, they discovered that glancing blows from flint arrows leave behind grooves that resemble the slashes that most archaeologists have long chalked up to butchering marks from knives. "It is likely that that projectile trauma on prehistoric human and animal bone may be considerably more common than has hitherto been recognized," they conclude.
"We are a charming species," Shea says wryly, suggesting that archaeologists start examining bones from the Stone Age for more signs of prehistoric arrows. Human fossils from about 10,000 years ago when farming started, until today, often bear marks of violence. Whether war started even before then, remains an open question, says Shea.
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