Traces of toxic plant compounds have been found on a handful of 60,000-year-old African arrowheads, providing the oldest chemical evidence that Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers used poison to bring down prey. The finding, published on 7 January in Science Advances1, adds to the growing picture of how intelligent and technologically advanced people were in this era. Making poisoned arrows is about as hard as following a 'complex cooking recipe', says study co-author Marlize Lombard, an archaeologist at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. 'You have to add to it the danger of the poison, and planning to work with it without getting poisoned yourself, then you have to hunt and track the prey animal under difficult and dangerous conditions sometimes for a day or two.' 'It shows advanced planning, strategy and causal reasoning ' something that is very difficult to demonstrate for people living so long ago, but for which the evidence is increasing every year,' agrees archaeologist...
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