The Evolution of Long-Range Hunting with Stone-Tipped Weapons During the Afrotropic Middle Stone Age: A Testable Framework Based on Tip Cross-Sectional Area

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In the Afrotropic biogeographic realm, with its diverse and high-density 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 suggest 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 hypothesize that effective long-range (~20–30 m) hunting with stone-tipped weapons was probably not practiced by ≥MIS 8, and that experimentation with long-range javelins—similar to those used by contemporary Ethiopian hunters—over these distances may have started during MIS 6, becoming part of the everyday Afrotropic hunting arsenal by the end of MIS 5.