Some of the first modern people in Europe used bows and arrows.

A site in France briefly occupied by modern humans is littered with stone points that were probably used as arrowheads, suggesting that bows and arrows were used in Europe much earlier than we thought.

Bows and arrows were first used in Europe much earlier than we previously thought. More than 100 arrowheads have been found in a rock shelter that was briefly used by a group of modern humans 54,000 years ago during the first forays into the territory by the Neanderthals.

“It’s amazing how many of them we have,” says Laure Metz of Aix-Marseille University in France.

Metz is part of a group excavating a rock shelter called the Grotte Mandrin in southern France. This refuge was used first by Neanderthals over 80,000 years ago, and then by modern humans around 45,000 years ago – around the time that modern humans displaced Neanderthals across Europe.

But last year, the team reported that for 40 years, about 54,000 years ago, Mandrin Grotto was used as a hunting camp by a small group of modern humans. Compelling evidence has come from a milk tooth that does not belong to a Neanderthal.

In the earth layers of that time, Metz and her colleagues reported finding more than a thousand small stone dots about 1 or 2 centimeters long. Of these, about 100 have been identified as broken or intact arrowheads, as they show one or more signs of impact damage resembling those seen when the team used newly made stone arrowheads as arrowheads. Others may also be arrowheads, but researchers aren’t sure.

“Mandrin’s advice could hardly have been used other than for aiming arrows,” says Marlise Lombard of the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, who was not involved in the study.

Most of the mandrin heads are broken. According to Metz, some of them are arrowheads that broke off inside the animals and were brought back to the camp in butchered meat. Many of them show signs of charring from fires.

Parts that remained attached to the shaft were also found. Because of the work involved in making arrow shafts, Metz says, when an arrowhead broke, hunters would bring the arrow back to camp and replace the arrowhead, throwing the broken one away.

So far, the earliest unambiguous evidence for the existence of bows and arrows in Europe has come from finds in Stellmore, Germany, dated to about 10,000 years ago, Metz says. However, it was considered likely that modern humans, who supplanted the Neanderthals about 45,000 years ago, had bows and arrows.

These people definitely used stone-tipped projectiles; the problem is that it’s impossible to tell from the larger stone points whether they were spearheads or arrowheads, Metz says. In some prehistoric sites in Europe, arrowhead marks may have been missed – archaeologists routinely discarded smaller pieces of stone, she says, considering them of no value.

Bows and arrows were first invented in Africa at least 70,000 years ago. Lombard and others have found stone and bone arrowheads at several sites in southern Africa dating from this time. Modern humans who left Africa may have spread this technology around the world.

Even though Neanderthals apparently saw bows in action, Metz says they were never invented. They continued to use large stone-tipped spears, which were either thrust directly or thrown by hand, and thus required close contact with their prey.

The team found no evidence that arrows were used in conflict, but Metz says that warfare is so common in human societies that she is convinced it took place in prehistoric times as well. She says that while it’s possible that this small group of modern humans were wiped out by the Neanderthals, despite having technological advantages like bows and arrows, we just don’t know what happened to them. “We have no idea,” she says.

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