Prehistoric humans hunted with poisoned arrows thousands of years earlier than thought

Pleistocene-era humans hunted with poisoned weapons according to new chemical analysis that found toxic plant-derived alkaloids on 60,000-year-old stone age arrowheads. ‘This discovery shows that people were using bow and arrow earlier than we assumed, and that they did this quite efficiently by poisoning the tips,’ explains Femke Reidsma, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Leiden who was not involved in the study.