Women may have pioneered hunting with weapons?

The common tool of the Bushmen is the Digging Stick. It's normally about 3 feet long and sharpened at one end. It's a general purpose tool, being used as a pole to sling bundles when the group moves. But it's primary use is digging up edible roots. Digging roots with a stick is much more efficient than digging with your bare hands. Both men and women carry digging sticks, and the men use them for killing animals from time to time. Women also use them to kill animals, but the normal pattern is for men to go on purposeful hunts while women are more likely to bash a snake or lizard they stumble upon. Discovering that the stick could be thrown with some accuracy (humans are remarkable for the design of our arms and hands to throw with power and accuracy) would have logically led to crafting a new style of stick that was longer and straighter and lighter (per unit length). But, yeah, the girls probably invented The Stick and the boys copied the girls. But note also that a common form of Hunting amongst Bushman males is "chase and grab", and if you're willing to spend several hours in the chase and were born with the talents of a marathon runner, a human can in fact EXHAUST an antelope and then simply strangle it to death. So for a couple hours' work, you get enough meat and fat to throw a party. And the women chip in roots and berries, and the children dance, and everybody tells stories late into the night. And it's all very Human. And nobody plots to use their sticks to beat in the heads of the tribe over the hill. mahuna

Spears can be used in hunting for stabbing, like needles or kitchen knives. Spears are not necessarily used by throwing. "In 2007, Jill Pruetz from Iowa State University in Ames discovered that chimps in Fongoli, Senegal, thrust sharpened sticks into nest holes in trees to stab or club small, nocturnal primates called bushbabies." This sounds like it may have originated from the way chimps also use sticks to get termintes by sticking them into holes in termite nests. Jim Smith