7,000-Year-Old Bone Arrowheads Held a Complex Poison, Study Finds
A new study into a 7,000 year old bovid femur found in Kruger Cave, South Africa, has shed lights on the secrets of Neolithic hunting in the region. The femur had three arrowheads embedded in it, suggesting that it was used as a quiver.
The arrowheads were found to have been coated with three separate toxic compounds, mixed together into a deadly cocktail by the hunters. This would therefore be the earliest unequivocal evidence of a man-made complex hunting poison that we have, according to the study published in Cell.
Analysis of the arrowheads revealed both digitoxin and strophanthidin, cardiac glycosides which act on the cardiovascular, neurologic, and gastrointestinal systems. In a less concentrated form such compounds are used today to treat congestive heart failure or cardiac arrhythmia, but in a concentrated enough form they can be deadly and it has long been known that they have been used as hunting toxins.
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The third toxin found on the bone arrowheads is ricinoleic acid, which indicates the presence of ricin, a well known toxin. Ricin, produced by the seeds of the castor oil plant, is an extremely potent poison if introduced to the bloodstream but far less dangerous if it does not penetrate the skin, suggesting that these Neolithic hunters may have chosen their tools with a certain amount of self-preservation in mind.
Ricin may have been found in even older contexts than this, its presence being non-definitively suggested on a 24,000 year old wooden “applicator” in Border Cave, also in South Africa. The residue in the Border Cave find may simply have been castor oil used for treating leather, but the fact that ricin has been again found suggests the possibility that the earlier find might have in fact been ricin.
The three compounds, found together in an organic mass at the bottom of the femur quiver, also may tell us something about migratory habits of these hunters. It is likely that they had to travel some distance to collect all these individual poisons, as they are unlikely to have been found growing together.
We have long known that Stone Age hunters used poisons to hunt, a necessary enhancement to their primitive weapons which otherwise could never have brought down large prey. But this new find provides a much earlier dating for complex, man-made (or man-gathered) poisons which suggest a high level of sophistication in these ancient peoples.
Header Image: The femur used as a quiver, with the arrowheads embedded in poison inside. Source: https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(24)02663-4.
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