Human Ancestors Made Deadly Stone-Tipped Spears 500,000 Years Ago
November 15th, 2012 |
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Human ancestors were fashioning sophisticated hunting weapons half a million years ago. An analysis of stone points from a site in South Africa called Kathu Pan 1 indicates that they were attached to shafts of wood and used as spears. The finding pushes the earliest appearance of hafted multicomponent tools back by some 200,000 years. [...]
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![journal.pone.0065275.g001 Figure 1. Plot of the locations of the languages in the sample. Dark circles represent languages with ejectives, clear circles represent those without ejectives. Clusters of languages with ejectives are highlighted with white rectangles. For illustrative purposes only. Inset: Lat-long plot of polygons exceeding 1500 m in elevation. Adapted from Figure 4 in [8]. The six major inhabitable areas of high elevation are highlighted via ellipses: (1) North American cordillera (2) Andes (3) Southern African plateau (4) East African rift (5) Caucasus and Javakheti plateau (6) Tibetan plateau and adjacent regions. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065275.g001](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/wp-content/blogs.dir/8/files/2013/06/journal.pone_.0065275.g0011.png)




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