If a spear point hits a target hard enough, the energy of the impact will cause the tip to break. He looked for clues that the weapon tips experienced high-velocity, mechanically propelled impacts. To see if the earliest North Americans - including people from the Clovis culture, Folsom culture (10,000 to 11,000 years ago) and other Paleo-Indians - used atlatls, Hutchings analyzed the fractures present in hundreds of spear points. The earliest solid evidence of atlatls in the New World, then, are 9,000- to 10,000-year-old spear-thrower hooks from Warm Mineral Springs, a sinkhole in Florida. However, these tools date back to the Early Archaic subperiod, which came after the Paleo-Indian period. The earliest known evidence of Paleo-Indian spear-throwers comes from 11,000-year-old "bannerstones," which are stone objects that may have functioned as atlatl weights, though the true function of bannerstones is debated, Hutchings said. In comparison, ancient spear-throwers from Europe were often made of ivory or bone. "People started wondering just how crazy you would have to be to run up to these things with just a sharp, broken rock tied to a stick."īut archeological evidence of Paleo-Indian atlatls and darts is lacking because these tools were often made of wood, which doesn't preserve well - the only part of the weapons left in the archaeological record are the stone points, which could have also been used in other types of weapons, such as spears, Hutchings said. Additionally, Paleo-Indians were thought to have hunted big animals, such as mammoths and ground sloths, which would have required powerful, long-distance weapons to take the animals down safely. Researchers reasoned that "if the spear-thrower originated in the Old World, then it only made sense that it must have shown up with early colonists," Hutchings said. Researchers have long thought that Paleo-Indians - including the people of the Clovis culture, who lived around 13,000 years ago and are considered one of the first American peoples - also hunted with spear-throwers. By swinging the spear-thrower overhead and forward, hunters could launch their darts with greater force than if they were to throw them like javelins.Īrchaeological evidence indicates that hunter-gathers in the Old World used atlatls beginning at least 18,000 years ago. Essentially, they were sticklike tools that contained a hook or spur at one end to hold a dart. Similar to bows, atlatls can propel flexible, pointed shafts - called darts, rather than arrows - at high speeds across long distances.
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