A Standardized Approach to the Origins of Lightweight-Javelin Hunting

ABSTRACT

The tip cross-sectional area (TCSA) approach is a useful morphometric approach to hypothesise about variation in Stone Age/Palaeolithic weapon-assisted hunting. Lightweight-javelin tips were recently added to the original standardized ranges for stabbing-spear tips, spearthrower-dart tips, and arrow tips, making the method more suitable to hypothesise about variability in ancient stone-tipped hunting strategies. Here I explore aspects around the origins of lightweight-javelin hunting through TCSA analysis. I suggest that MIS 6 is the most likely timing of early lightweight-javelin hunting in southern Africa, and perhaps also in the Levant, and that subsequently this hunting behavior – used in tandem with stabbing spears – probably became increasingly widespread. I also predict that the earliest evidence for lightweight-javelin hunting may come from geographic regions that experience cyclic resource stress and where endurance running is habitual.

KEYWORDS:

• TCSA analysis
• stone-tipped weapons
• throwing weapons
• visuo-spatial integration
• persistence hunting

Acknowledgements

I thank the editors of this special volume for the invitation to contribute. I am also indebted to John Shea who shared his data, and to Liliane Meignen and David Pleurdeau for giving their blessing to do so. Any mistakes or omissions remain my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marlize Lombard

Marlize Lombard is Research Chair and Professor of Stone Age Archaeology at the Palaeo-Research Institute of the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. She leads the inter-disciplinary Palaeo-TrACKS (Tracing Ancient Cognition and Knowledge Systems through the Stone Age/Palaeolithic) Research Programme that is geared towards generating knowledge about the biological, behavioural and cognitive evolution of Homo sapiens in sub-Saharan Africa, and how these aspects relate to each other.