stonetip1.jpg

Before there were guns, there were swords and spears. But here's a surprising fact: the stone tipped projectiles actually pre-date our species by a whopping 85,000 years.

According to a team of archaeologists from the University of California, the remains of the oldest known stone-tipped throwing spears suggests that they are 280,000 years old. The spear was found at an Ethiopian Stone Age site known as Gademotta.

If true, that means that those weapons are older than the Homo sapiens. Does this suggests that our predecessor species were smart enough to make weapons? According to Yonatan Sahle, one of the researchers:
"Technological advances were not necessarily associated with anatomical changes.. The advances might have started earlier... High-quality raw materials were nearby, so those could have allowed for the full expression of technological skills... [and there] was a mega lake at the site. It might have attracted stable occupations there, further fueling technological advances."
Who knows what else we'll find that we didn't originally create. [PLoS One via Discovery]

Image by amymyou under Creative Commons license