Before 50,000 BCE: (Two Competing African Inventions of Composite Projectile Weaponry — The Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow, the Spear-Thrower First Know…

Before 50,000 BCE: (Two Competing African Inventions of Composite Projectile Weaponry — The Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow, the Spear-Thrower First Known Among Early Fully Modern Humans Spreading from Africa into the Levant Around 48,000 BCE and Carried to Australia Eurasia and the Americas, While People on the Eastern Side of Africa May Have Invented the Bow and Arrow Even Before 50,000 Years Ago, the Bow Ultimately More Efficient Being Lighter Faster and More Accurate and Eventually Supplanting the Spear-Thrower in Most Parts of the World): Early, fully modern humans devised the first composite projectile weaponry, and our ancestors both in Africa and those who began the human spread out of the home continent participated in this history. One of the two types of early composite projectile implements was the spear-thrower (or atlatl) and dart. Recent work identifies the first known presence of this implement among the early, fully modern humans spreading from Africa into the Levant around 48,000 BCE. As people spread outward to Australia and Oceania and then across Eurasia and to the Americas, they took this invention along with them. In Africa itself, in contrast, the spear-thrower is not generally found — and probably for a very good reason. Recent archaeological work suggests that people living on the eastern side of Africa may have been the earliest inventors of a competing and ultimately more efficient kind of composite projectile weaponry: the bow and arrow, even before fifty thousand years ago. Over the long term of early world history, the bow and arrow — because it was lighter in weight, propelled its projectile at far greater speed toward its target, and was more accurate in reaching and bringing down that target — came to supplant the spear-thrower in most parts of the world. Two African inventions, then — the spear-thrower and the bow and arrow — competed for dominance across the entire span of human technological history. The spear-thrower was the first to leave Africa, carried by the earliest emigrants into the Levant, Oceania, Eurasia, and the Americas. But the bow and arrow, invented in eastern Africa and retained there while the spear-thrower traveled abroad, was the superior weapon, and over the millennia it spread outward from Africa to supplant its rival across most of the globe. The weapon that came to define hunting and warfare in most human societies — the bow — was an African invention that stayed home while its competitor traveled, and then gradually replaced that competitor everywhere it reached.