Before the introduction of the shotgun, bows and arrows and blowguns were the weapons of choice for hunting monkeys in South America, Asia, and Africa ( 12– 16). The hafting and launch mode for the bone points are determined through the combined consideration of the form of the point (size, weight, and proximal morphology), use wear (hafting and impact), and comparison to ethnographic observations of arboreal mammal hunting. All points are made on Cercopithecid long bone. Decoration or grooves for holding poison ( 10, 11) were only found on a single point ( Fig. 2, C and F) while others, such as the geometrics, show no signs of having been fixed to a shaft ( Fig. Similar notching attributable to hafting measures was also observed on a number of the bipoints ( Fig. Unipoints exhibit notches on their left and/or right sides around their midline indicating fixed hafting using ligatures ( Fig.

Flaked and ground into shape, three broad categories of point were identified: unipoints ( n = 24 18.4%), bipoints ( n = 18 13.8%), and geometrics ( n = 2 1.5%), with the majority of the collection made up by fragments exhibiting both manufacturing traces and impact fractures, though not complete enough to determine the original form ( n = 86 66.1%).

Of the artifacts made on terrestrial bone, 130 are consistent in size, morphology, weight, and use wear with having served as projectile points. Blanks, unfinished tools, and waste pieces were identified in each of the four phases, with broken fragments of finished artifacts, along with several points displaying cut marks consistent with those produced during retooling activities, suggesting that maintenance of weapons was also regularly practiced. 1).Īnalysis of the recovered faunal remains determined that the osseous tools to be described below were made on site. Also described is a diverse toolkit of bone and tooth tools indicating the manufacture of plant- and/or hide-based items that may represent some of the earliest clothing or nets in a tropical setting, alongside a complex array of symbolic artifacts-this record stretching from c. Here, we present evidence for the earliest use of bow-and-arrow technology outside of Africa-a unique tradition using innovative osseous-based arrow heads. Ongoing analysis of the site has already found that it holds the earliest microlith assemblage in the region ( 9) and attests to targeted hunting of prime-aged semi-arboreal and arboreal monkeys and squirrels ( 4). It is only recently that multidisciplinary excavation of long, well-dated cave and rockshelter sequences is enabling these questions to be investigated and the findings to be compared to records from more customarily discussed regions ( 9).Īs the site of the earliest fossil appearance of Homo sapiens in South Asia ( 5), Fa-Hien Lena cave in southwestern Sri Lanka is a crucial locale for understanding the adaptive capacities and cultural flexibility that humans required as they first moved throughout the diverse environments of Asia. Despite these suggestions, and the recognized importance of the region for human evolutionary studies, detailed studies of the material culture recovered from its most ancient sites have thus far been lacking, particularly with regard to postulated personal ornaments ( 6– 7), potential projectile technologies ( 4, 8), and other forms of material culture that provide insight into how human societies negotiated the South Asian tropics during the Late Pleistocene. As early as the 1980s, it was proposed that microlith technologies alongside bone technologies and ochre use appeared in Sri Lanka earlier than they did in Europe ( 5). South Asia, and Sri Lanka more specifically, has emerged as a particularly important region for understanding how our species managed to successfully colonize a wide variety of environments among a backdrop of changing climates and interhominin contacts ( 1– 4).

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