Early Bows and Arrows In Context

Researchers found the telltale stone points in a rock shelter that was inhabited by early modern humans about 54,000 years ago in what is now southern France. Until now, 12,000-year-old wooden artifacts in Northern Europe were the earliest concrete evidence of bow-and-arrow technology on the continent.

The stone points are the earliest evidence in Europe for the use of bows and arrows by early modern humans and suggests that the technology may have given this human lineage an edge over the Neanderthals for hunting prey, the researchers propose in a paper published Feb. 22 in the journal Science Advances. 

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In a study published in the journal Science Advances last year, many of the same researchers reported finding teeth and stone artifacts that showed early modern humans occupied the site between 56,700 and 51,700 years ago — pushing back the earliest known date of the arrival of early modern humans in Europe by about 10,000 years. . . .

The stone and bone points found in the rock shelter at Grotte Mandrin in the Rhône River valley aren't the oldest evidence for bows and arrows anywhere, however; supposed arrowheads, also associated with early modern humans, found in South Africa are more than 70,000 years old.

From Live Science.

The Upper Paleolithic era which corresponds roughly to the period when behaviorally modern human hunter-gatherers appear, long after anatomically modern humans appear ca. 200,000-300,000 years ago. It has conventionally been dated to about 50,000 years ago (reinforced by estimates from contemporary genetics to find a common ancestor for non-African humans). 

But, really start to sea behavioral modernity that distinguished modern humans from other archaic hominins, including fishing implements, bone tools, and artistic work, as well as bows and arrows, at about 70,000 years ago in Africa, which is also around the time that modern humans start to enter Southeast Asia and Australia. 

This was probably a time of expansions of a culture of modern humans that made these behavioral leaps, not just leaving Africa, but also within Africa, that would more or less put in place the demographic make up of Africa until the Holocene era (ca. 10,000 years ago). One major development between the start of behavioral modernity ca. 70,000 years ago, and the Holocene, ca. 10,000 years ago, however, was the domestication of the dog, perhaps 30,000 years ago.

We can say with increasing confidence that some modern humans did leave Africa earlier than 70,000 years ago, reaching the Levant, Arabia, and India. But, the earliest evidence of modern humans in Europe dates only to about 54,000 years ago, modern humans reached the Americas much later, and they reached much of Oceania (beyond the Philippines and Papua New Guinea) only in the Holocene era.

Also, humans were completed banished from most of Europe and Northern and Central Asia in the Ice Age that brought the Last Glacial Maximum ca. 20,000 years ago, except for a handful of refuges in Beringia, Iberia, Italy, the Caucasus Mountains, and perhaps the Altai and even Tibet, only to repopulate these regions afterwards. 

There may have been a tiny and marginally viable population of modern humans in the Americas prior to the Last Glacial Maximum, but they didn't thrive and may even have gone extinct before being replenished the glaciers that encased much of northern North America finally started to subside.