The World’s Oldest Boomerang Is Even Older Than Scientists Thought, a New Analysis Suggests
Researchers revisited a crescent-shaped, mammoth tusk artifact discovered in Poland and estimated it’s around 40,000 years old
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In the 1980s, archaeologists discovered a well-preserved, curved boomerang made from a mammoth tusk in a cave in Poland. They later tried to estimate the crescent-shaped ivory artifact’s age using radiocarbon dating techniques but grew to suspect that their sample had become contaminated, skewing the results.
Now, based on new analyses, researchers are more confident in the boomerang’s timeline. It’s likely more than twice as old as it was originally dated, having been carved by nomadic hunter-gatherers between 39,000 and 42,000 years ago, according to a study published Wednesday in PLOS ONE.
“It’s the oldest boomerang in the world, and the only one in the world made of this shape and this long to be found in Poland,” says lead author Sahra Talamo, a chemist at the University of Bologna in Italy, to BBC News’ Helen Briggs.
Did you know? Prehistoric throwing sticks
- Simple weapons called throwing sticks had been around for millennia before the mammoth tusk boomerang was carved in Poland, with the oldest known throwing stick dating to 300,000 years ago.
- Boomerangs stand apart from throwing sticks because of their aerodynamic nature and specialized, curved shape.
Researchers initially found the two-foot-long boomerang in 1985 while excavating the Obłazowa Cave in southern Poland. Nearby, they also unearthed animal bones, antler tools, a snail shell, pendants made from fox teeth, a bone bead and a human thumb bone.
In 1996, radiocarbon dating techniques revealed that the human thumb bone was around 31,000 years old, but the same method suggested the boomerang was just 18,000 years old. That “unexpectedly younger” age didn’t make sense, based on the boomerang’s location in the layers of sediment in the cave, the researchers write in the paper. They grew concerned about possible contamination.
“Even a trace amount of modern carbon—from glue or conservation products—can throw off the radiocarbon date by tens of thousands of years,” Talamo tells New Scientist’s Christa Lesté-Lasserre.
She adds that the boomerang should serve as a cautionary tale for museums. “When you find something extraordinary, you should not cover it with glue or other restoration materials before completing all your analyses,” she says.
The researchers wanted to try re-dating the boomerang, but they knew they might run into the same contamination issues. They also wanted to “avoid further damage to this highly significant artifact,” they write in the paper. So, instead, the team re-dated the human thumb bone and dated 13 animal bones that had been found nearby. Then, they used statistical modeling to estimate the age of the boomerang.
The new timeline suggests the boomerang is between roughly 39,000 and 42,000 years old, which means it’s 30,000 years older than the earliest known boomerangs made from wood by Indigenous Australians, which are around 10,000 years old. (Depictions of boomerangs in rock art paintings in Australia, however, date to as early as 20,000 years ago.)
Based on the design and size, researchers believe the ivory artifact found in Poland was likely a “non-returning” boomerang—one that would not come back to the sender after being thrown. They suspect it was used for ceremonial or symbolic purposes, because it’s covered in decorative incisions and appears to have been polished; researchers also found traces of red pigment on it.
That idea also aligns with what researchers know about human behavior at the time. Starting around 40,000 years ago, humans in Europe demonstrated “enhanced symbolic capacity,” the researchers write in the paper. They began dabbling in art, making three-dimensional animal and human figurines, engraved or painted blocks, rock art and “aesthetically sophisticated” tools, they add.
The Obłazowa Cave appears to have been occupied by both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens at various points during the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods. But researchers say the boomerang was almost certainly created by humans. It’s “absolutely clear evidence of behaviors unknown to us, practices of early Homo sapiens, which contrast sharply with everything we found in the deeper cultural layers in Obłazowa, layers left by Neanderthals,” says study co-author Paweł Valde-Nowak, an archaeologist at Jagiellonian University in Poland, to Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove.
