The Oldest Weapons in North America Offer a New View of Prehistoric Tech
The Paleoamerican migration plot thickens.
By Neel V. Patel
History exists in the past, but that doesn’t mean it’s static. New findings, published Wednesday in Science Advances, illustrate the discovery of a dozen projectile points at the Debra L. Friedkin site from the Buttermilk Creek complex in Central Texas. Those spearheads date back to more than 13,500 years ago, making them possibly the oldest weapons ever found in North America, and also painting a more complex picture of what we previously thought we knew about the continent’s first humans.
Spear points are a pretty iconic aspect of the Clovis, an old culture of Paleoamerican hunter-gatherers. Those points typically date back to between 13,000 and 12,700 years ago, and are lanceolate (leaf-shaped) points made of stone, replete with a concave base that enables them to attach as a spear’s tip. So the discovery of spear points that predate the Clovis is quite a big deal.
“This discovery is significant because almost all pre-Clovis sites have stone tools, but spear points have yet to be found,” says Michael Waters, a geologist at Texas A&M University and the lead author of the new study. “The dream has always been to find diagnostic artifacts — like projectile…
