Abstract
In the Afrotropic biogeographic realm, with its high-density and diverse mammal population, early humans may have been hunting with stone-tipped weapons since ~500 000 years ago. Being able to hunt effectively from a distance has several important adaptive advantages. Yet, until now, African long-range javelin hunting remained unexplored as intermediate between short/medium-range, hand-delivered and long-range, mechanically projected weapons. Insights gained from a new Afrotropic comparative dataset with 950 weapon tips of known use – including several javelin types – provide a contextually appropriate middle-range tool for assessing the probable effective hunting ranges of Middle Stone Age points. We use a novel application of the ballistically relevant tip cross-sectional area (TCSA) statistic to define contact, short-, medium-, long- and maximum-range hunting and discuss the adaptive advantages for each. The approach is applied to assess developments and variations in the best-fit hunting ranges of 5597 stone points from 62 Middle Stone Age Afrotropic assemblages. By aligning our results with the Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) record we found that long-range hunting with stone-tipped weapons at ~20-30 m was probably not practiced by ≥MIS 8, and that experimentation with long-range javelins – similar to those used by contemporary Ethiopian hunters – over this distance may have started during MIS 6, becoming part of the everyday Afrotropic hunting arsenal by the end of MIS 5.