[~64,000BCE] - The Bow & Arrow with a Brief History of Stone Age Weapon Technologies

[00:00:00] Magical Powers

You might call me sentimental, but I still have my original Nintendo game. Boy, that's basically a yellow brick with a black and white screen. On my brick. I spent an incredible portion of my childhood bashing buttons and ignoring my parents' requests to come and eat dinner already but it was a little more exciting whilst playing the classic Super Mario Land two, I could eat a mushroom and turn into a fire, Mario, which sadly didn't happen when I ate my own mushrooms. Now as my evolved fireball wielding hero, I didn't need to worry about pesky turtles or goers taking my life. I could safely blast them outta my path from a distance. the relief from the constant anxiety of death by turtle washed over me every time as I celebrated my step up in weaponry, that might just help me get to the next level. It's no wonder that magical powers to strike from afar are a common theme in our favorite stories, characters, and games.The Jedi channel, the force against the dark side.

Gandalf raises his staff to send Arks flying Harry Potter blasts, the one out of an opponent with his favorite and quite possibly overused expel amus. While I would argue that every superhero shooting energy beams from their hands represent the same fundamental human desire.

To project power beyond our reach, but we didn't need magic to achieve that. Our ancestors were figuring out how to build their own superpowers using sticks, stones, and eventually some nice tight strings of animal.

As we will learn, this is more than just boys and their toys each new weapon actually marks a turning point. Just like my evolutionary fire, Mario, upgrade. It could be the difference between reaching the next level or falling into the abyss. Over the human story, we'll see other hominids who failed to innovate. Falling away into the dusts of history, leaving Sapiens behind armed and dangerous as the lone surviving apex predator of the world.

[00:02:10] Introduction to Stone Age Weapons

Welcome to How to Change the World, where we trace the history of innovation and speculate about the future of humanity. I am your curious host, Samuel Webster Harris, if you are new here, we are traveling through history in chronological order, uncovering the inventions and ideas that shaped our species, and asking what do they tell us about the present.

Each episode will of course work on its own, but for the full story, I do recommend starting at the beginning because every step forwards rests on the last

Today we are traveling through the entire Stone Age and their weapons from the first sharp rocks chipped nearly 3 million years ago, all the way to the pivotal invention of the bow and arrow

along the story, we will see how each upgrade in weaponry shaped not just our chances of survival, but our culture, our bodies, even our psychology. Weapons didn't just change the world around us. They changed us.

A chimpanzee can tear your arm off without breaking a sweat. A gorilla, technically speaking has enough bite force to crush a bowling ball.

Even a house cat has sharper claws than any human, but we outsourced biology to technology and doing so, we became something more lethal. today we follow the story of how it happened.

[00:03:46] Dates Housekeeping

Now, just before we jump in, a quick note on dates. Historical dates, especially in deep history, are subject to error margins and giant changes. When someone discovers something new. Secondly, the first evidence of a technology isn't always the moment that it became widespread , but for consistency, I'm going to use the earliest known evidence in my episode titles, but within the story, I will flag when something became common.

my aim isn't to mislead, oversimplify, or offend any archeologists, just to chart the broad tides of innovation in as accurate way as possible.

And with our housekeeping complete, let us explore the pages of history.

[00:04:28] 1 - THE OLDOWAN FLAKE (~3 MYA)

If you wanted to join the cutting edge of technology two and a half million years ago, you didn't need venture capital, a computer science degree, or even a subscription to TechCrunch. You picked up two rocks, smashed them together, and you prayed that something sharp would fall out.

Congratulations. Welcome to the Older One Tool Industry, humanity's first Startup Accelerator for the Intellectually Gifted ape.

Our founding members here were Homo Habilis, which literally translates as handyman, we gave them that name because we think they invented stone tools.

There may be evidence of this rock smashing revolution even as far back as 3.3 million years ago.

But these first tools weren't for fighting or conquest, just for cutting things, which raises the obvious question of. What is so world changing about a sharp rock that can't even vanquish your enemies? Well, picture the African savanna 3 million years ago-ish. Lions hyenas, saber Tooth Cats ruling the world with clothes that shred flesh and jaws that crush bone. Our ancestors, they, they're off hiding in a bush. They're bottom feeders in Nature's Carnival Guild, and they tried to creep in after the real predators have finished their meals.

These clever apes are racing to no scraps before the next wave of scavengers arrive. They're using their flat teeth and clumsy fingers to tear at whatever they can find.

Now, it's not hard to picture them trying to move quickly and picking up a rock to hack away a bit faster at their meat. At some point, they realized that freshly smashed rocks produce the sharpest flakes and those are really handy. And then the final revelation that changes everything is that they can make these sharp rocks themselves by smashing rocks together whenever they feel like it.

was there a grand eureka moment with lightning bolts across the sky? Probably not. But before fire, before language, before agriculture, this was humanity's first declaration of Independence. A small little step away from evolution in the hands of mother nature. And a giant leap towards taking charge of our own destiny.

This little flake of rock wasn't glamorous. It was the prehistoric equivalent of duct tape, ugly, disposable, and ridiculously useful, these sharp edges unlocked a treasure trove of marrow, calorie rich brain food hidden inside bones,

and with this food source unlocked.

[00:07:07] Evolution feedback loop

What happened next is an elegant feedback loop of evolution. Better tools were leading to better nutrition. Better nutrition led to bigger brains. And bigger brains would of course lead to even better tools.

And furthermore, the rest of our bodies were changing too.

Chimps have stronger hands in thisBut we traded that brute strength for something more valuable precision. Our opposable thumbs lengthened, and the musculature changed to allow a more delicate accuracy that let us hold a stone just right.

With a stone doing some hard work for us. Our hand, arm, and jaw muscles were becoming less necessary, and what happened was our ancestors made an irreversible contract with technology. Every generation that relied on tools became less able to survive without them turning us into something new. A creature that would live or die by its tools.

Sites in Ethiopia, archeologists have found evidence of systematic flake production, not random rock bashing anymore, but workshops where our ancestors were methodically manufacturing these sharp edges because they were no longer a nice to have, but a staple of society.

[00:08:18] Human obsession with time saving

This older one, flake, as we call it,

was humanity's first taste of a drug that we never stopped craving. Before the stone flake, you could spend all day wrestling with a zebra carcass with just your teeth and some optimism.

But when Homo Habilis first cracked open the stone and discovered the shark flake within, they unleashed something far more revolutionary than a better tool. They unleashed time itself.

If that

Sounds familiar. Almost every invention sense from washing machines to food delivery apps, they buy us time as to what our ancestors did with those saved hours, maybe staring at the stars, grooming each other, finding new ways to annoy their siblings.

Or perhaps working even harder today. We are still in a mad rush to save time to just fill it with something else,

Which certainly makes you wonder sometimes why we bother.

[00:09:08] Status flexing

Another curious thing that we like to do with our latest technologies is to show off about them. You could imagine the person with the first sharp flake suddenly having some status.

could picture him waving it around, saying to his companions, oh, you guys are still gnawing. Oh, I don't do that anymore. I'm more of a tool user.

In fact, we see echoes of this in modern hunter gatherers, the kung san. They refl their stones by campfires at night, taking pride in perfectly sharp edges.

Worth boasting about skilled tool makers were gaining prestige as knowledge became power. Everybody wanted to learn their techniques, watch their demonstrations, and copy their methods.

And what we're witnessing is the birth of our first knowledge based economy sending ripples through every human society. That followed where being clever started to matter more than being strong,

[00:10:02] 2 - ACHEULEAN HAND AXE (~1.7MYA)

Right. For 700,000 years, these stone flakes dominated human technology, a very impressive run. But as bigger brains and more sophisticated hands were evolving, we began asking questions, why can't I dig holes with this thing or scrape hides? Maybe I could chop and shape wood well, around 1.8 million years ago in East Africa.

Homoerectus emerged and they began imagining something that would dominate human culture for over a million years.

The Helian hand ax, it worked brilliantly for all its new tasks, but it was also beautiful, perfectly symmetrical with an elegant teardrop shape. It had edges flaked with obsessive precision, and it was far more refined than it ever needed to be. So the question is, of course, why did they bother?

[00:10:55] Why did we care about beauty?

One clue was found in 1942.

Archeologists working in Kenya , discovered something that stopped them cold, a cache of hand axes, dozens of them buried together. Some of them so large, they'd be impossible to actually use. Many of them showed no signs of wear at all. They'd been made admired and carefully stored away.

You could imagine a prehistoric antiques roadshow. Well, this Chuan hand ax has never been used, still has the original napping marks. I'd value it.

Three goats in a decent marriage prospect. Hmm. Very good. So that was our first clue. And the last time I pretend to be on Antiques Roadshow. Another clue comes from what it takes to make one of them. Creating a hand Axe requires you to simultaneously be an artist, an engineer, someone with the patience of a saint.

You had to look at a lump of rock and envision the elegant teardrop inside of it. Then you needed to plan hundreds of strikes in perfect sequence, and you needed the fine motor control to do it. If you strike too soft, nothing happens. You strike too hard and you get irregular edges, or you snap the entire thing.

[00:12:08] Status games

So back to the question, why bother making it pretty and symmetrical? Well, the hand act was becoming a signal. Everyone who saw it knew that the person who made this had that patient skill, intelligence and attention to detail that we just learned about. Those are exactly the types of traits you want in a mate, a hunting partner or a clan member.

It's the same reason that people buy expensive Rolexes when a cheap cashier will do. We are not buying function. We are buying what the object says about US status,

this had a shake up on human society. Suddenly the elderly weren't just liabilities, they were mastercraft people who knew techniques accumulated over decades. The best hand ax makers.

Had respect and students wanting to learn from them. So intelligence was now a little sexy and evolution started selecting for it,

[00:13:00] Brain growth and imagination

. Archeologists have estimated that brain volumes in Homoerectus ballooned around 600 to 1000 cubic centimeters during this era.

So this shaping of tools was shaping our minds towards language art, and of course, imagination. The ability to envision things that don't exist and create them is a special trait that we were nurturing.

All in all, the Helian Hand Act lasted from 1.8 million years ago until about 300,000 years ago. , with the same basic design. It's spread from Africa to Europe to Asia, carried by Homoerectus as they colonized three different continents. No other technology in human history has lasted that long. Unchanged, not even close. Sadly. However, for Homo Habilis. The handyman, the story was not so rosy. The species that had invented the original stone flakes couldn't keep up the sophistication required for hand ax production, they were left behind by their superior cousins. This was humanity's first great filter, innovate, or die, a pattern that we'll see repeated again and again throughout our history.

But that's not the only thing we'll learn from the hand acts. It also taught us that tools can be functional and beautiful simultaneously. That craftsmanship matters and the tools we create say something about who we are. So every time that you admire, well-designed technology, every moment of satisfaction from owning something beautifully made.

You are experiencing emotions first felt by homoerectus holding their perfectly symmetrical hand acts against the African sky, knowing they had created something remarkable because they could,

[00:14:42] 3 - SWEAT AND PERSISTENCE HUNTING (~1.5MYA)

now the hand ax had made us better

at processing meat, and hypothetically our kills. But there was a slight problem. We weren't that great at catching things most days. We were hoping to stumble on something already dead. Evolution, however, was working on a solution for us that would turn our weakness into a strength. As we were perfecting our hand axes, nature was perfecting us, or at least our ability to run very long distances.

And for context here, I'll compare some other animals. A lion can sprint at 50 miles an hour for only 200 meters. And if they jog instead, you know, that could be easier. They can only jog about 500 meters. That's not very far

a gazelle. They are the endurance athlete of the savanna.

They can run for about five kilometers, which is quite far, but a fit human, they can easily jog for 20 kilometers. you might think, how did that happen?

, well, around one and a half million years ago, something bizarre was happening to our bodies. We lost most of our body hair and replaced it with millions of sweat glands. We are certainly not the only animal that sweats horses, apes and hippos do as well, but humans are by far the most profuse at it.

and ironically, if you're wondering, the phrase, sweating like a pig doesn't make any sense because pigs don't even have sweat glands at all. For all we know, they might even look at us and wonder what is wrong with those gross, wet, slimy humans?

Anyway, most animals pant or seek shade to cool down, whereas humans can dump heat through our evaporation across the entire surface of our sweaty bodies. Now when you combine our hairlessness and our sweaty skin our improbably long legs, arched feet for shock absorption and our Achilles tendons that store and release energy like a biological pogo stick.

, well now you essentially built a perpetual motion machine powered by our stubbornness. We aren't the fastest or strongest at anything at all. We can jog steadily for hours, even in the midday heat when every sensible predator is resting in the shade,

this had two primary uses, just like vultures that can ride the winds scanning for prey.

This helped our scavenging opportunities by increasing our range dramatically

more importantly, it also allowed us, to deliberately isolate and relentlessly track potential prey across the hottest parts of the day.

Scared the animal runs, overheats, stops the pant. We jog up, it panics runs. Again, you repeat this process for hours. Eventually the selected prey collapses from heat stroke, we can safely approach, finish it off with some basic weapons, like a stone clubbing stick, or even a pointy stick

so in a rather clever bit of evolutionary juujitsu, early humans had taken what should have been a catastrophic disadvantage living on a continent that's essentially a giant barbecue and we weaponized it. Our naked, sweaty undignified bodies were becoming dangerous in harmony with the tools that it worked with.

This new trick was another step in our weapons journey

However, nature was ready to throw some curve balls at us.

[00:17:59] 4 - HAFTED SPEARS (~500,000BC)

So around 800,000 years ago, Ice. sheets started to grind their way across Europe and Asia. The game was changing. Familiar prey gave way to colossal new beasts, wooly mammoths, giant bison cave bears that could swat you like a fly even after you'd run them down.

homo Heidelbergensis looked at a willy mammoth, an animal, roughly the weight and temperament of an angry double decker bus covered in fur and this ancestor had a curious thought lunch.

Now this of course, raises a question.

How do you kill a wooly double decker bus when your best weapon is a sharp rock, a pointy stick, or the ability to sweat well, the solution was genius in its simplicity. What if you combine the sharp rock and the stick ?

With the advent of plant-based adhesives and some clever wrapping to bind the stone known as halting, we created humanity's first composite technology. An engineered tool of distinct different parts working together, which turned ordinary branches into lethal extensions of the human arm,

the haled spear was born. And to understand why halting mattered so much, picture yourself in the moment that it proved decisive.

Imagine a wounded mammoth, bleeding , angry looking for revenge.

Yesterday your hunting party got close enough to drive a fire hardened wooden spear into its hind quarter. The point barely penetrated before it snapped off.

Now you've got the worst situation possible. A massive animal that's wounded enough to be furious, but not wounded enough to slow down.

The thing is these wooden spears don't really cut it. Literally, they just bounce off thick hides or break on impact. You needed something that actually penetrates deep and does serious damage fast so you can get away before those tusks find you. So toric, let's imagine he had spent two days making something new, a straight ash shaft with a razor sharp flin point. Bounds to the end with birch tar and sinew. When he approached and drives his new spear into the mammoth's chest, the stone tip punctures straight through the hide and muscle, the kind of deep, devastating wound that just wood alone could never achieve.

Then he immediately drops a shaft sprints away like a madman. truly weakened. Now the group can track the mammoth and they're able to finally finish it off as it collapses. That night, of course, he has a crowd examining his spear by the fire, and within weeks, every hunter in the clan is making stone tipped spears.

Of course it didn't happen exactly like that. And what really happened, we'll never know. But what we do know from archeological sites in South Africa is that our human ancestors were halfing spear points 500,000 years ago.

[00:20:52] Steps to make a Hafted Spear

if you've ever struggled assembling IKEA furniture, well try making a haled spear without instructions. Using materials you find lying around on the Pleistocene landscape, you needed to be a material scientist knowing your oak from your ash, obsidian from your flint. A chemist 'cause birch bark, only produces tarp between 340 and 400 degrees.

C. So too hard. It burns too cold, and you just get a useless syrup. Finally, you need to possess the patience of someone waiting for the British rail on a Sunday. If you don't have one of these qualities, or you get a single step wrong, you have just wasted three days and you're still holding a stick in a rock that refused to cooperate.

At least with Ikea, you get an Allen key and a wordless diagram with a Swedish person on it looking disappointed in you. As for making spears, it's amazing. Anyone bothered, but what they unleashed with them was a quantum leap in lethality, so it certainly paid off.

Now they likely began as hands beers for stabbing with, but at Shingen in Germany preserved in the mud for 300,000 years. Archeologists found eight entire wooden beers crafted from spruce and pine. Some of them over two meters long. , if you might be imagining some clumsy pikes, it's surprising to see how sophisticated these were.

Aerodynamic weapons balanced like modern javelins with the weight centered perfectly in the front third for a stable flight. So these were clearly made by minds that understood physics, even if they couldn't name it.

[00:22:24] Co evolution of shoulder throwing

One really interesting reason behind the later development of throwing spears. Was the required co-evolution in humans.

We have evolved a shoulder structure with an incredible range of rotation. Unlike any other primate, chimps can't throw anywhere near as effectively because their shoulders are built for climbing trees rather than launching projectile.

These first changes to our shoulder began 2 million years ago, but the final changes only occurred in the Neanderthals 400,000 years ago. And of course, homo sapiens

If you imagine for a secondd someone throwing a javelin in slow motion,

They're running forwards, and they pull back to one side, and then their hips rotate first. Then their torso twists independently, a bit like some interpretive dance, and this is then all followed by the shoulder and then the elbow, and then finally the wrist snaps forward.

Each joint is adding speed.

 Turning g the body into a biological whip. So we're basically catapults made of meat and bone,

it's both elegant and a little absurd, which generally seems about right for human evolution.

Even though I studied biology, I still find it amazing how our bodies and tools co-evolved.

[00:23:37] Teamwork and language co-evolution

Now, furthermore, on this point of co-evolution, the spear also transformed our ancestors socially from high risk scavengers, into calculated, coordinated apex predators.

If you remember the episode on the development of language that reached its pinnacle 70,000 years ago further back 400,000 years ago, language was transforming from simple alerts to something more tactical. Telling someone you drive the beast towards the ravine Me, wait here you circle behind last minute I stabbed belly. That all requires some grammar, future tenses, conditional thinking .

We needed language for tactics.

With the spear hunt, we see the prehistoric equivalent of Napoleon planning in advance, or a football coach drawing plays in the dirt ,

You can just picture the scene once it's planned out. A dozen hunters moving with silent understanding. Born of countless practice hours, they have designated roles, perfect timing, and absolute trust in each other because each hunter must have faith that their teammate won't break ranks when the 10 ton animal turns on them.

there really is something about shared risk that's a very bonding affair when you have to trust people.

[00:24:47] Leadership qualities

this new social dynamic was revolutionizing the prehistoric popularity contest.

Previously status came from making lovely hand axes whilst sitting by the fire looking sophisticated. But now you need to know if BTI will really stand his ground when the bison charges, or if he'll suddenly remember some urgent business elsewhere.

If you think of our moral frameworks today, traits like courage, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. They all came from our hunting past.

As it made us who we are today.

[00:25:16] Homo species

one final point on Spears. All these demands on our skills and our psyche. It's no surprise that the spear era was evolutionary rush hour brains continue to expand with enthusiasm,

and we see more waves of human species changes. Homo Hidal Bagis replaced Homoerectus around 800,000 years ago, and later we see the Neanderthals appearing in Europe 450,000 years ago, and then 300,000 years ago, we see the Deni Sos in Asia whilst homo sapiens that's us we're emerging deep in Africa.

So besides laying the groundwork for teamwork and the evolution of our very own species, the humble spirit teaches us that sometimes the most revolutionary breakthroughs come from combining existing elements in new ways, and that is exactly what we are about to do next

[00:26:07] 5 - ATLATL / SPEAR LAUNCHER (~100,000-50,000BC)

as the ice age, megaformer was growing scarcer, they also became more adept at fleeing at the site of humans. If homo sapiens were to succeed in their global expansion, they needed a hunting upgrade. , somewhere at a moment, lost to history, an unknown genius looked at their spear and they had a thought that would change everything.

What if I could throw this father and faster. Without building bigger muscles.

With this next tool that was invented, we could imagine a story like this. Two hunters standing in a clearing,

the older one, Tema grips his traditional spear, the weapon, his father taught him to use the weapon that's fed his family for generations. The younger hunter, however, Nasher, he holds something very different. A wooden lever, about 50 centimeters long with a small hook carved at the end of it.

In his other hand, a lighter, flexible spear, he's calling a dart. It's a smaller version built for flight.Temu s scoffs. You think that little stick is going to beat experience? let's find out. Nisha replies confidently loading his nimble dart against the hook.

They're both aiming at the same target. A tree trunk, 30 meters away, roughly the maximum effective range for a hand thrown spear. Tim Mu goes first. He's still strong and experienced and knows exactly how to put his shoulder into his throat. The spear flies straight, but falls short by five meters clattering into the grass.

Isha now takes three running steps, whips his arm forward with a motion that looks almost casual and a dart explodes from his device. It covers the 30 meters in a blink and punches into the tree trunk with a very satisfying thwack that echoes across the clearing

tmu stairs. How has this just happened?

We are talking about a device that should be more famous than it is the AAL Addle. It's a simple wooden lever, basically, and it acts like a mechanical extension of the arm. It wasn't magic, but it certainly felt like it.

With a flick of the wrist, this spear thrower could launch projectiles at speeds over 100 miles an hour, transforming ordinary hunters into long range predators.

We call it the Ale Al, because that was the Aztec word for it, which literally means far, far. The Inuit, however, knew it as the nuac they used it for harpooning seals and the Aborigines wielded the WO era, which they used as a multi tool for digging things, starting fires, and of course as a deadly spear launcher all in one.

[00:28:40] How an Atlatl works

The Ale Ale is essentially physics in your hand. That's curiously similar to those tennis ball throwers for dogs. If you know those plastic sticks to help you fling a tennis ball, it's almost identical, but for spears, and I think it's very sad , that there's no formal sport that we get to play with them these days. 'cause I would actually love to try using one

anyway. The lever amplifies every bit of force from your shoulder, elbow, and wrist

into a whipping motion, and it's essentially an extra mechanical upgrade on top of all your biological upgrades we've already spoken about.

And the results were staggering. where A hand thrown spear might be accurate to kill at 15 or 20 meters. And AAL atle had lethal accuracy at 40 or even 50 meters, and a total range of up to 200.

They were so effective that Aztec warriors later proved that these darts could penetrate the metal armor of the Spanish Conors

invading Central America. A testament to the weapons devastating power.

Now, if you can puncture metal armor, you can certainly pierce mammoth hide. And that extra distance from the large, dangerous, scary animal certainly reduces your chances of being trampled or more to death.

There's more fast moving prey like deer and horses work nearly impossible to ambush with thrusting spears. And they suddenly became fair game as well. As large animals were growing scarcer during the ice age instead of our ancestors humbly bowing to the constraints of nature, we were developing more efficient hunting techniques to squeeze reliable food out of a dwindling supply. A theme that we will explore later,

[00:30:12] Accuracy over strength

But a different theme that we have already seen a few times this episode is how a new weapon shakes up the social order.

A smaller hunter with perfect timing and smooth mechanics could outperform the clan's strongest member So status began shifting from who is the bravest to who is the best shot,

[00:30:30] Timeline of Atlatl development

which leads to a question of when did this all start happening? evidence for Al Als is tricky because wood rarely survives. Decomposition. The earliest confirmed examples are about 19,000 years old.

But wound patterns in animal bones suggest use as far back as a hundred thousand years ago. And at least what is certain is that by 40,000 years ago, we see these distinctive wound patterns proliferating across Africa, Europe, and Asia.

Perfectly in time with homo sapiens expanding globally and as Neanderthals were disappearing.

It is clear that the technological gap was widening. Sapiens kept getting better weapons whilst Neanderthals were stuck with their trusty, but aging thrusting spear.

[00:31:15] 6 - BOW AND ARROW (~64,000BC)

the Ale Ale wasn't the only innovation fueling our growth. On a somewhat similar timeline, humans were brewing a weapon that would decide the fate of nations for millennia to come.

Ever dissatisfied, instead of being grateful for our new invention, we started to wonder about its limitations. The throwing motion was still dramatic and visible. You had to put some of your weight into it. The DART itself was kind of large and you could only carry a few of them

somewhere in South Africa around 64,000 years ago, sapiens were experimenting with a radically new concept,

storing energy inside Bentwood and then releasing it all at once, the result was elegant. A carefully selected piece of wood bent with a string of sinew and when pulled back, the energy stored in this bow could send a stone tipped arrow flying slightly through the air.

A at over 150 kilometers an hour.

It could be accurate At distances, the atle atle could never match you could stand completely still or hide in cover and you could even reload faster and carry a lot more ammunition with you.

So it's got efficiency, stealth and deadly precision in one beautiful package. Now, with all these advantages, you think the bow and arrow was about to sweep across the world, but it didn't. Despite being invented at least 64,000 years ago, the bow didn't spread globally for tens of thousands of years.

There is some early evidence of it in France around 50,000 years ago, but in Europe, we don't actually see anything widespread until about 15,000 years ago. In fact, it only reached the Americas around 6,000 BC and in Australia. The Aborigines never independently developed it at all.

[00:33:06] How to make a bow and arrow

why is this? Because it was phenomenally difficult to make.

If you think about our previous innovations, the aal aal, it's just one extra lever added to the other levers on your arm,

And you might accidentally invent ideas like it. You could flick a piece of mud at a friend with a small stick

you might even find a larger hook stick , with which you can fling a stone, so you're well on your way with a bit of refining to flinging spears, each small step along the way, teaches you something. Now the bow doesn't work like that.

You need three separate components. They all have to work together perfectly. If you get any one of them wrong, the entire system fails completely.

If your wood is too brittle, bow snaps. was it the wood species, the moisture content, the thickness, or your pulling technique? Well, you can't tell because it's broken.

What if the bow is fine and you use the wrong string material? It's too tight and breaks, or it's stretchy and floppy and the arrow goes nowhere.

Again, no luck. Or even with those two. Correct. You have the perfect bow and string, but your arrows are unbalanced. They just flap and tumble mid-flight, and your device is pretty useless.

So it's a chicken and egg problem. You can't test and improve one part unless all three parts are already working. And those three parts don't just fall together.

[00:34:33] The First great invention?

If you remember our first Stone Flakes, they were literally just some sharp rocks.

Even the invention of tar that was probably discovered by accident from some leftover sticks glued together at the edge of a fire. But now when we talk about the bow and arrow, that required more than just doubling down on a few improvements, it required a vision.

For me, it does really represent a huge leap in our imagination. Someone, clearly saw a device like this in their mind before it ever became a reality. It's easily the most complex individual piece of technology we've covered so far on the show

considering the circumstances 64,000 years ago, I honestly think it's a discovery comparable to the Wright Brothers developing flight or Edison with his 10,000 attempts at the light bulb. Now, of course, the discovery process is lost to history, but I think it's quite possible

that a single imaginative individual had a very bright idea and stuck at it whilst other people were telling them they were crazy. Perhaps some friends helped out. Maybe not, regardless, this individual or group must have tried all sorts of hair-brained ideas until one day it finally worked.

[00:35:50] Yes my sister shot the headmaster...

And That gets us to the next challenge. Quite frankly, it's a bit dangerous to learn. Bows can snap arrows can miss fire. And I actually have a family story for you here. during a archery lesson. My own sister became famous at school for accidentally shooting No. Other than the headmaster and before you ask the obvious question of what was he doing pratting about in the firing line?

Well, no. He was sensibly standing behind the students and my sister somehow fumbled the bow and the arrow launched backwards and got him in the leg. Now, the mind boggles as to how this happened Exactly, but that's the thing. Mastering this technology required a lot of trial error and often complete failure.

But what's progress without some accidents? After all,

[00:36:40] Hunting with archery

whatever went wrong in history, which is doubtless lots of things. It was certainly worth it. Suddenly, humans could effectively hunt small fast prey. Birds, rabbits, fleet footed antelope that could even evade beers and Aal aals.

This new ability to silently shoot from beneath cover allowed humans repeated attempts without alerting an entire herd.

We can even look at how modern hunter gatherers use them. see how transformative it was.

The kung san used poison tipped arrows, allowing them to strike from a distance and then track a winded animal until they collapse.

Hadza use archery to stalk giraffe, zebra, and Impala during the midday heat when other predators are at rest. this flexibility of archery was smoothing out the feast and famine cycle that had divined human existence for millions of years. But I wanted to share a short story from the AE people in Paraguay.

Kib Wgi moved through the rainforest canopy, almost silently. Bow ready at 37 years old. He was in his prime. Anthropologists who studied the acho. People . Found that hunting skills peaked in men's thirties and forties, where experience and physical capability were perfectly aligned.

Now above him, a howler monkey was crashing through the branches

, he'd been pursuing this troop for over an hour, patiently predicting where they'd go next,

when a chance for a shot arrives, he draws and releases in one fluid motion. The arrow catches the monkey mid leap and it tumbles 40 feet to the forest floor.

, kgi, descends quickly after all in the rainforest, every kill attracts competitors. Be that Jaguars or other hunters.

That evening when he returned to camp, carrying three monkeys across his should. , the reaction of the tribe was immediate. Children gathered round, women glanced approvingly. The meat would be shared, of course, according to established rules. But everyone knew who bought at home.

Now, the researchers who documented this tribe found something fascinating. The best hunters like kib, WGI had a significantly more children than the average hunters. So this suggests that excellence with a bow in our ancestors was changing what kinds of humans thrived.

[00:38:55] Evolution compared to Neanderthals

sapiens, master of the Bow coincides with something fascinating that was happening to our bodies. We'd evolved in a completely different direction from that of our Neanderthal cousins.

Neanderthals were barrel chested powerhouses. They had massive upper body strength, thick bones, Lean muscle mass designed for close quarter combat. They were masters of the thrusting spear and used their raw physical power to drive points into prey from arm's length. But that strategy, of course, comes with a cost. If you've ever seen gym bros eating all that muscle requires them to eat constantly.

And in a world where there isn't a Walmart around the corner, That's a serious disadvantage. , homo sapiens, however,

We were losing muscle mass. We became lighter, with lower calorie needs.

We didn't need that in the interval strength anymore because our weapons were doing the work and thus, in a world where food sources were disappearing, we could travel further. , we could hunt more successfully whilst needing less food. Anyway, ,

all of these slight advantages, up to an existential difference that we'll learn about in the next section. But firstly, I just want to wrap up my thoughts on the bow and arrow.

I will say it again. The bow arrow was a remarkable step despite being invented 65,000 years ago. It was humanity's preferred, , long range weapon until gunpowder arrived only 500 years ago.

Considering the amount of other innovation in that time period, that is an incredible run. The bow appears in virtually every human culture's mythology and military history , because it simply defined how humans

projected power for most of our history it witnessed the rise and fall of countless civilizations, we can think about the arrow that caught Achilles in the heel 12 centuries before Christ, or the one that hit the King of England. Harold Godwinson in the eye at the Battle of Hastings in 10 66.

More recently, there was the Mongol horse arches conquering the entire Eurasian step under Genghis Khan in the 13th century, and the English long bow that dominated medieval warfare until the 16th century.

The ripples across history in the wake of the bow is a story of artistry, cunning, and a religious desire for strength over others.

, it's about a species settling into its chosen superpower. Once that string was first drawn, history kept pulling towards cities defended by Arches, Empire, sustained by dominated supply lines, and humanity's desire to wield greater and greater power.

[00:41:30] HUMANITY - THE GREAT FILTER

Right? So we've traced our progress from the flake to the hand ax to the spear, al atle, and eventually the bow if you've listened to the episodes in order, you'll remember that we've studied fire and language , to let you know what's coming up.

, we'll soon be looking into clothing and boats.

Now adding these all together creates the full Apex Predator toolkit of the Stone Age, setting us up for world domination, I think it's best to discuss in this episode here, what happens when you hand a species like us, creative, ambitious, and fundamentally insecure, the ability to kill. Anything from a distance while staying warm and being able to cross oceans. We essentially became an extinction event with legs ,

[00:42:18] The great Australian Extinction event

so looking at the first apocalypse in Australia 65,000 years ago, humans crossed treacherous waters, carrying half its beers and fire.

Within a few thousand years, the evolutionary equivalent of a sneeze, 85% of the large animals simply cease to exist, poof, lost. Were the die protons, a giant woba creature, the size of a car . Also the marsupial lines with bolt cutter jaws. Megalania. A monitor lizard longer than a school bus. And Thunderbirds. Yes, that's a real species. They are the largest avian species ever standing three meters tall and weighing half a.

All of these giants had ruled in their lands for millions of years. Then humans arrived, soft, slow, weak looking with some pointy sticks,

And suddenly the game was over. These animals simply had no evolutionary programming to fear. If you compare us to a giant wombat, we are the size of a little rabbit, and you don't expect a little rabbit to eat your babies, burn your house down, and then finally kill you from 30 meters away with magical flying sticks.

It's just not in your mental repertoire.

[00:43:34] Europe and the Neanderthal Extinction

However, Australia was just the beginning in Europe.

Neanderthals had happily ruled the continent for 300,000 years. Without us, they could coordinate mammoth hunts , and they had survived multiple glacial cycles. But when Homo Sapiens established a growing presence 45,000 years ago, some with Aal, AALS, others with a bow and arrow, the balance shifted.

Competition for food sources grew existential, willy mammoths, cave bears, giant deer were all dying off one by one. Neanderthals, who lacked the tools to hunt smaller, faster prey. Their close quarters hunting style. Having served them well for millennia became obsolete.

We haven't seen much evidence of it, but if they did ever face humans in a battle, their spears were like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Thus, within 5,000 years, the last Neanderthals had vanished from their final refuges in Gibraltar and the Iberian Peninsula

at this point,

sapiens was now alone. Every other branch of the human family tree had been pruned away. Neanderthals de bins, homoerectus, homo floes, theis, all gone.

, but our quest to be the apex predator of the world wasn't yet over

[00:44:46] The Conquets of America - Pleistocene Bliztgrieg

the final chapter was the fastest, the conquest of America. Around 15,000 years ago, humans crossed the bearing land bridge into the Americas, carrying their stone age arsenal with them. And what they found was a continental zoo.

American mastodons, and mammoths. Giant four ton grounds. Lost the size of elephants with claws , or, how about short faced bears that were 12 feet tall with the biggest carnival there, but prowling around were saber-tooth cats, dire walls, and the American Lion, which is 30% bigger than the African one.

The whole thing sounds a bit like a fantasy novel, which is certainly sad. They no longer exist , because, yes, within a thousand years of humans arrival, we had colonized the entire continent. And again, 85% of the large animals were gone.

Paleontologist call us the Pleistocene Re armed humans swept through native ecosystems like a plague. Our projectile weapons that have began as an edge in the competition for survival. Were now handing us the keys to the entire animal kingdom as the custodians of it.

We slightly abuse that power, but without even knowing what we were doing, instead of struggling to survive the storms that nature throws at us, we had become the storm itself.

. As the bega Jetta says, and famously quoted by Oppenheimer, I am become death the destroyer of worlds.

[00:46:11] The Rise of Human Conflict

on that positive note, we are set to discuss another awkward aspect of human history as our populations grew. And grew whilst rapidly wiping out many of our subsistence food sources. Weapons became a source of power against each other around 13,000 years ago along the Nile Valley

climate stress, put further strain on the available food and one cemetery holds 59 bodies whose bones tell us a story. . 24 of the individuals died violently. Men, women, children with stone projectile points embedded in ribs, skulls, and limbs. Interestingly, some of them bear both healed and unhealed wounds.

Meaning that they had survived early attacks only to die in later ones. So this wasn't a single battle. It was a recurring theme of violence raids and ambushes that were stretching across years, maybe generations.

That's just the start, 3000 years later At nata, at Kenya, we see another mass grave with 27 bodies scattered where they had fallen, including pregnant women and children. This time, it wasn't a fight, it was a massacre.

Human ingenuity for solving problems had turned towards a new project killing each other. Weapons that began as tools to feed our families also helped us perfect the Raid, ambush, massacre, and eventually the Art of War., This is a story that we'll learn more about in the future,

but at this point on the historical timeline, we are arriving at the dawn of the agricultural revolution . And the beginning of civilization.

But first, we have plenty more to learn from the Stone Age in this season.

And of course, we have more to learn in this episode by reflecting on the timeless lessons that apply today and into the future.

[00:47:58] MODERN LESSONS AND FUTURE WEAPONS

So we've traced weapons from flakes to bows, but the patterns aren't stopping. When we look at what keeps repeating, it can tell us something about both who we are and who we might be tomorrow. I think it's clear that human progress is just inevitable, and instead of talking about specific futuristic technology like laser systems in space, I'll save some of those for discussion in a premium episode and instead focus on themes.

To do this, I will lean on a few ideas from Napoleon, a man who never saw a weapon more complex than a musket, but knew something about thinking long term.

The Stone Age showed us that we invent technology that iteratively removes parts of ourselves from the equation, from flakes, removing a need for claws, spears and arrows, reducing the need for so much muscle.

This continued in history with like the crossbow, that decoupled drawing from release then the firearm providing all the projectile energy itself. Now missiles even guide themselves. And we are building intelligences that remove us entirely from the equation.

[00:49:07] Algorithms

So where does that lead us? Napoleon said, God is on the side with the best artillery. And today we could update that to God is on the side with the best algorithms.

Two themes that we've discussed that will continue our distance and persistence as the bow put us 50 meters away from our target will continue building weapons that put us entire continents away.

Today a military operator in Nevada can eliminate targets in Afghanistan with a button push and then drive home for dinner, possibly stopping at McDonald's if he feels like it weapons that maximize physical distance between killer and killed will never go outta fashion because let's be honest, humans can be quite enthusiastic about inflicting violence on each other, but considerably less enthusiastic about receiving it.

On the topic of persistence, some of the latest drones can fly for hours, scanning, waiting, and when they find a target, . It can dive exploding on contact. It's the ultimate self-contained persistence hunter. It never ties, it never loses a scent, and it never gives up. If you think about our upgrade for sweat, that made the death of an animal we stalked inevitable. Well, that seems very tame

Compared to these flying monsters. But where does this all go? remember, we are inclined to race. When Sapiens developed the bow and arrow, they didn't use it sparingly or share it freely with Neanderthals. Today's military powers aren't slowing down to wait for international treaties.

They're doing the opposite. They are accelerating in data centers across the world. Researchers are training the next waves of intelligence to give to our robots. We're building a full arsenal of policing and killing machines that swarm and fly, walk and talk. And So it's clear that the biological detachment from power will continue as it always has and will do this using algorithms on aa very related theme. Napoleon also said that, the worse the troops, the greater the need of artillery.

This is about democratization. Stone age weapons democratize killing like children could kill with bows because muscles mattered less.

Later, crossbows allowed peasants to kill knights, and today a javelin missile costing $175,000. Can destroy a $3 million tank from two miles away.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian teenagers , can build $500 suicide. Drones that achieve similar results. So expensive isn't always better, it's just expensive.

It's Neanderthals had expensive bodies to run compared to the efficient sapiens. And this shows how much of a liability expense can be.

An interesting statistic here is that in the first year of the Ukraine War, Russia used 400 shahi drones. By year three, they are using 5,000 drones per month. Whilst they have parked their entire fleet of expensive battleships.

[00:51:58] Supply Chains

But democratizing weapons creates a new problem. One that Napoleon understood intimately well. After watching his grand Army starve in Russia, he famously reflected that an army marches on its stomach,

and today we might say army fights on its supply chains, which is less catchy, but victory goes to whoever , can manufacture fastest, adapt quickly, and iterate cheaply. The billion dollar aircraft carrier is being superseded by 3D printing and mass producible robot swarms.

The new priority now is access to the raw materials, be that rare earth elements, computing chips, explosives, or the energy supply to build them.

Remember, in the Stone Age, we might not even have fought the Neanderthals, but we wipe them out simply by taking away their resources. So the pressure for national sovereignty over the crucial ingredients of supply chains will be as important as the weapons themselves.

[00:52:55] Cognitive Warfare

Yet even perfect supply chains can't win. If you forget the other battlefield. Napoleon recognized this instinctively when he said there are but two powers in the world. The sword and the mind in the long run, the sword is always beaten by the mind.

In fact, NATO agree with him.

They declare that the brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century.

It's interesting here because cognitive warfare represents like the ultimate stone edge pattern, removing physical force entirely. Now the enemy can be inside your head. Of course, we're already familiar that social media algorithms can promote division and YouTube recommendations can radicalize people one video at a time.

But that's just scratching the surface.

. Deep faking can show dead soldiers to their families while simultaneously analyzing social media of individual soldiers to craft personalized psychological attacks. Field Marshall Hindenberg said that besides bombs that kill the body, his airmen throw down leaflets that kill the soul

as we continue to get all our information from technology, it will be harder to trust what's real or designed. The future might not be an era of invasions by countries

as much as it could be about turning citizens against their own governments, using their own platforms.

[00:54:13] Never interrupt your Enemy - Teamwork

this leads us to Napoleon's final insight, which is perhaps the most worrying one for us in the West.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake

politically. We are increasingly fighting ourselves which leaves us wide open to foreign manipulation where bots can happily see conspiracy and rage online. Adding to that is a second problem.

After the World Wars, the West built strong nations with engineering focused economies. Now we have become knowledge based economies with more lawyers and accountants and engineers and builders. For a case study, let's look at high speed rail.

California has spent 20 years trying to build 120 miles of it. The UK has spent the same amount of time trying to build a slightly more ambitious 140 mile track. , if we are very lucky, both projects might eventually get completed in 10 years time.

Meanwhile, China has built 30,000 miles of high speed rail. Now that's not a technology problem, it's just coordination. if a nation can't build a few miles of railway without decades of arguing, that could be considered a warning sign.

, humans working together built a Stonehenge, the pyramids, the Colosseum. And yet somehow we now need 30 public consultations to move a post box I would like us to remember that it wasn't technology alone that made humans dominant.

Our tools require teamwork to be effective.

And it was that ability to work as a group that gave us dominance and was perhaps the most ultimate weapon of all. So the biggest lesson from history for the future of weapons is that although the technology will keep changing, the future will reward those who can work together.

[00:56:02] Roundup

Now of course, this brings us full circle to where we started. We began this journey 3 million years ago with a curious ape picking up a rock and seeing something more. Each innovation built upon the last, creating an unbreakable change of progress that stretches from the African savanna to Silicon Valley.

Those new pathways that fired when our ancestors first struck stone against stone. A firing right now in the minds creating quantum computers, autonomous weapons, and future innovations we can barely imagine.

So a final note is this, once a capability is invented, bow and arrow, atomic bomb, or autonomous killing machine, it's rarely uninvented. You can't simply decide one day that these were bad ideas and we can just put the genie back in the bottle. From the great extinction events over history.

We know that we can abuse power a little bit before we know what it even means. Today with our Stone Age brains, we can build God-like technologies, which, if you think about it for more than 30 seconds, is slightly terrifying. ,

and it's worth considering that our previous innovations also changed us physically, socially, and intellectually over thousands and thousands of years. But with the speed that our technology now moves today, we can't rely on Mother Nature anymore. It's up to us to evolve culturally towards systems of greater wisdom to survive our new powers.

Einstein warned us with the advent of the atomic bomb that our technology had exceeded our humanity. . Let's hope that we can be wise enough to correct that.

Well, on that cheerful note, I hope that gave you something to ponder, and if you enjoy the show or this episode, please subscribe and join me on the journey as we continue to explore the entire history of innovation in chronological order. Now, if you're feeling kind and generous, you can also practice kindness from a distance.

With just a few clicks of a button, you can leave me a positive rating from anywhere in the world. You can also leave me a comment. It is truly a helpful act whilst I establish the show.

if you have an aggressive desire to learn more about humanity's tool changes over the last few hundred thousand years, I can recommend that The Human Story by Robin Dunbar,

or if you really, really want to learn more about just weapons, then stone Tools in human evolution by John j. J. Is nice and comprehensive , and other papers and links will be in a description.

If you didn't know, I am Sam Webster Harris, the writer, editor, producer, and everything else that you can think of on this podcast, pretty much besides the designer who is Francisca Koha.

And. And Jeremy Ends is my podcast coach who listens to me existentially complaining about my delays on which, sorry, this episode was late. Uh, it was hard.

And on that, our next step forward in history will be the invention of boats, which I'm looking forward to floating down. Whew.

It has been taking me longer to get these episodes together than I'd like, but as a samurai say, do not hesitate to face challenges for it is through them that you can become the best version of yourself. Sit with that. Remember to stay curious because what we know is a drop and what we don't know is an ocean.