Bow and arrow: earliest evidence found in South African cave dates back 64,000 years

A flexible piece of wood, a string tied between its two ends, and a thin shaft with a piece of stone fixed to its tip. They look like ordinary things. Yet with them humans made the weapon that, for the first time, let them strike their prey from a safe distance, without going near it. The oldest known evidence of this invention so far comes from a cave in South Africa and is about 64,000 years old.

The vanishing weapon

Writing the history of the bow and arrow is not easy. South African archaeologists Marlize Lombard and Laurel Phillipson wrote in the journal Antiquity in 2010 that the organic parts of bows and arrows, such as wood, bone, string and feathers, rarely survive. So the decision whether a bow and arrow was used at a site depends largely on a close study of particular types of stone points and their surroundings.

They drew up a list of strict criteria and tested whether an ancient collection met them. According to them, an ancient assemblage from Sibudu Cave in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province meets these criteria, which indicates that the bow and arrow was in use there 64,000 years ago. The tools belong to the period experts call the Howiesons Poort. The study examined traces of use on the stone points and substances stuck to them.

The evidence is thus not direct but circumstantial. The bow itself has not been found, but the arrow points and the marks of their use bear witness to it.

Arrows dipped in poison

Another surprising report came from the same region in 2026. In the journal Science Advances, Sven Isaksson, Anders Högberg and Marlize Lombard reported that traces of toxic plant chemicals were found on tiny sharp stone pieces from the Umhlatuzana rock shelter, also in KwaZulu-Natal. The layer in which the pieces were found is about 60,000 years old.

According to the researchers, the poison was probably obtained from the sap of the bulb of a local plant, which was also documented as an arrow poison in later periods. In their words, this is the first direct evidence of plant-based poison being used on the tips of ancient hunting weapons. The use of poison suggests that these hunters did not merely know how to shoot arrows but had a whole strategy: the arrow strikes, the poison does its work, and the prey is then tracked.

Beyond Africa

When modern humans left Africa and spread across the world, this skill went with them. In 2020, also in Science Advances, Michelle Langley and colleagues published the discovery of bow-and-arrow hunting equipment about 48,000 years old from Fa-Hien Lena cave in Sri Lanka. According to them, this is the earliest evidence of the bow and arrow outside Africa. It is also one of the oldest human sites in the tropical rainforests of Asia, where survival was not easy.

In Europe, the picture is still debated. The earlier general view was that weapons such as the bow or the spear-thrower appeared suddenly in Europe and Asia about 45,000 to 42,000 years ago, with the arrival of modern humans. In 2023, Laure Metz and colleagues published an analysis of tiny stone points about 54,000 years old from a layer at Grotte Mandrin in the Mediterranean region of France. Based on marks of impact and use on them, the researchers say these were projectile weapons launched with a device, and that they were found alongside the oldest known remains of modern humans in Europe.

The oldest preserved bows

Wooden bows survive only from thousands of years later. According to the National Museum of Denmark, some of the oldest and best-preserved bows in Europe were found at a Stone Age settlement in the Holmegaard bog on the Danish island of Zealand. Remains of five bows were found there, dating to about 7000 BC. They were as long as a man was tall and were made of elm, because yew, the tree famous for bows, had not yet begun to grow in Denmark. According to the museum, the maker placed the flexible outer wood on the back of the bow and the hard inner wood on the front.

The principle of the bow lives on

The secret of the bow is that flexible wood, once drawn, stores energy, and on release all that energy passes to the arrow in an instant.

For centuries the bow and arrow was an important weapon for both hunting and war. Today it is mostly a sport and a hobby, but the idea behind it, releasing stored energy all at once, still works in many machines. And it all began with hunters who, 64,000 years ago, were shaping tiny stone points in the cave at Sibudu.