Hunting with poison arrows may have begun 60,000 years ago in Africa

Traces of plant toxins have been found on 60,000-year-old arrow tips in South Africa, showing that ancient hunters made use of poisons much earlier than previously known.

Until recently, the evidence for the use of poison arrows only extended back to around 8000 years ago. Then in 2020, an analysis of arrow points dating to between 50,000 and 80,000 years old found they were consistent with the design of poisoned arrow tips from the past 150 years.

That team, led by Marlize Lombard of the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, found that one 60,000-year-old bone point was coated in a sticky liquid, but they couldn’t conclusively demonstrate the presence of poison.

Now, Lombard and her team have discovered that five 60,000-year-old quartzite arrowheads excavated in 1985 from Umhlatuzana rock shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, still contain traces of the toxic plant alkaloids buphandrine and epibuphanisine.

Most likely, the scientists say, these come from a milky exudate from the roots of the plant Boophone disticha. This sticky substance can be applied directly to an arrow point or processed by being heated and dried and combined with other substances to create a resin.

“If we found it on only one artefact it could have been coincidental,” says Lombard. “But finding it on five out of 10 sampled artefacts is extraordinary, suggesting that it was deliberately applied 60,000 years ago.”

The same poisonous sap has been used by the San people in southern Africa through to modern times – Lombard suspects that it has been in continuous use for at least 60,000 years.

It is lethal to rodents within 30 minutes and can cause nausea and coma in humans. For large game, the poisons may have slowed them down enough for hunters to be able to track and pursue their prey until they could be killed.

“If I speculate, Boophone poison was probably discovered by people eating the bulbs and then becoming sick or dying from it,” says Lombard. “The plant also has preservative, antibacterial and hallucinatory properties, so that it is used in traditional medicine, and human deaths still occur as a result of accidental overdosing.”

To help confirm the result, the team also tested arrows collected by Carl Peter Thunberg, a Swedish naturalist who visited South Africa in the 1770s and wrote about the use of poison arrows by Indigenous hunters. The tests detected deadly alkaloids from the same plant species.

Sven Isaksson, a member of the team, from Stockholm University, Sweden, says the discovery is early evidence of the sophisticated use of plants. “We know that humans have been using plants for food and tools for a very long time, but this is something else – the use of biochemical properties of plants, such as drugs, medicines and poisons.”