There is a 2025 book by Sam Kean titled Dinner with King
Tut: How rogue archeologists are re-creating the sights, sounds, smells, and
tastes of lost civilizations. I blogged about it in a post on January 26, 2026
titled What did Egyptian laborers who built the pyramids eat? That book has
eleven chapters that cover the following dates:
Africa – 75,000 years ago
South America – 7500 BC
Turkey -6500s BC
Egypt – 2000s BC
Polynesia – 1000s BC
Rome – AD 100s
California – AD 500s
Viking Europe – AD 900s
Northern Alaska – AD 1000s
China – AD 1200s
Mexico – AD 1500s
Chapter 2, South America – 7500 BC, has a section starting on
page 67 about a spear thrower (shown above) called an atlatal:
“The atlatl is a two-foot-long stick with a hook or spur on
one side. The darts are wooden shafts with a stone point hafted to one end and
a concave cup carved into the other. (Asana prefers shorter darts, a yard or so
long, since they can double as spears in a pinch). To load an atlatl, you hold
it at shoulder-height, parallel to the ground, and fit the cup end of the dart
into the spur-hook. To fire the dart, you step forward and snap the atlatl down
with your wrist. Imagine flicking paint off a paint-brush – same motion.
Overall, your thigh and core generate the power, which gets channeled into the
dart via the arm and snapped wrist.
To the uninitiated, the atlatl probably seems baroque. Why
not just hurl a spear, instead of using a stick to fling it? A detailed answer
would require a long digression into the physics of levers and rotational
velocity, but the basic idea is this: the longer your arm, the faster you can
throw something. (Think of those long plastic ball-throwers for playing with
dogs.) Atlatals effectively lengthen your arm by a foot or two and therefore
provide a huge speed boost: experts can fling the darts 80 mph, while spears
alone top out around 50 mph. Speed is a major factor in a weapon’s penetration
ability and knockdown power, so atlatl darts are pretty darn deadly.
Despite their obscurity nowadays, especially compared to
spears or arrows, atlatls were probably the most widely used hunting weapon in
prehistory, in climates from the tropics to the poles. As a result, there’s a
serious contingent of atlatl enthusiasts within experimental archaeology.
I get to try atlatls myself during an undergraduate class
that Mein Eren teaches. We meet at a frisbee golf course near campus, where he
unloads several dozen atlatl darts from his pickup. Each is around six feet
long and a bit less than an inch thick, and they’re fletched with fake feathers
– neon, green, black-and-blue, crimson. I’m surprised how bendy they are, quite
flexible. Atlatlists debate why that flexibility matters, but rigid darts
simply don’t fly as straight or true: darts need spring.
The atlatls Eren hands out are pretty basic – wooden sticks
with hooks. Most people throughout history used something similar, but the
inhabitants of the treeless altiplano would have saved their wood for darts and
made atlatals from the leg bones of vicunas. (I actually stumbled across one
such bone on a walk in Peru. It was bleached white, and differed from
traditional atlatls in that it had a kink in it. But when I whipped it downward
with my wrist, it felt perfect.)”
And Chapter 7, California – AD 500s. has another topic
starting on page 270:
“Bows and arrows were the single most complicated piece of
technology in prehistoric times, incorporating nearly every material used by
our ancestors – wood, stone, sinew, antler, resin, rope, feathers. And while
atlatals long predated them, bows and arrows eventually replaced atlatals on
nearly every continent. There are several reasons why.
The big advantage of atlatals is that their heavy darts pack
quite a punch; you can really wallop game. But as megafauna went extinct on
continent after continent, the importance of landing a big blow waned in
tandem. Hunting smaller game requires stealth and precision, and bows and
arrows allow you to hide in a blind and snipe at game instead of scaring them
off with the big clumsy movement of an atlatl toss. You also stand still while
shooting them, and can sight down an arrow and take aim, something that’s
impossible with the side-armed atlatl. Arrows offer a superior rate of fire,
too. With atlatals, you usually get one throw before an animal flees, but it’s
possible to fire several arrows in quick succession. (Some Plains Indians could
keep eight in the air at once). All in all, after the decline of the megafauna,
arrows proved more superior in most hunting scenarios.
But as with all technological advances, the switch to bows
and arrows was accompanied by social upheaval. For one thing, bows and arrows
seemingly favored individuals over groups. When everyone used big, slow
atlatals and got just one shot at game, hunting in groups was necessary to
hedge bets. In contrast, the precision and stealth of bows and arrows
encouraged solitary hunting. The group became less important.
Arrows might also have upended the relations between the
sexes. Recall from Chapter 2 that women often throw atlatals better than men.
Bows and arrows, however, tend to favor males. That’s partly because men are
generally taller and generally have more upper body strength, bothof which
provide an advantage when shooting bows. (Arm length and arm strength allow an
archer to use a stiffer bow and pull the string back farther, generating more
snap). That said, it wasn’t all biology; cultural factors favored males as
well. However clumsy atlatals seem at first, people could master them
reasonably quickly; children as young as seven can take down deer with them.
Proficiency with arrows takes more practice; few children can reliably kill
game with arrows until their mid-teens. And for whatever reason, most cultures
in the ancient world – in Africa, in Asia, in Europe, in the Americas – denied young
females the chance to develop this skill, shunting them off to gather plant
food instead. As a result, bows and arrows became a male-dominated weapon.”
Images of an atlatl and bow hunter came from Wikimedia
Commons.
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