60,000-Year-Old Poisoned Arrowheads Found in Southern Africa

A collection of ancient arrowheads from southern Africa has retained traces of toxic plant residue for around 60,000 years.

The finding moves the earliest direct evidence for the use of poisoned arrows back by tens of thousands of years.

Although the poison would not have caused instant death, the researchers say the residue preserved on the arrows could kill a rodent in roughly half an hour. It was likely intended to weaken hunted animals, allowing people to follow them more effectively.

Until now, Africa's oldest known poisoned arrows dated from the mid-Holocene, about 7,000 years ago.

Poisoned arrows in Late-Pleistocene southern Africa

"Poisoned weapons are a hallmark of advanced hunter-gatherer technology," write an international team of researchers from universities in Sweden and South Africa.

"Apart from providing the first evidence of hunting with poisoned arrows during the late-Pleistocene in southern Africa," they add, "our findings contribute to the understanding of human adaptation and technobehavioral complexity during a phase of rapid, cumulative innovation in the region."

The ancient arrow tips were originally excavated in 1985 at Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province. However, they then remained untouched in a museum for decades.

Researchers from Stockholm University, Linnaeus University and the University of Johannesburg have now examined 10 arrowheads from the collection that carried visible residue.

Using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, the international researchers detected toxic compounds derived from plants on several arrowheads. This is the first direct evidence of poisonous plant material on Pleistocene hunting weapons.

Boophone disticha toxins found on arrowheads

The most probable source is Boophone disticha, a plant species common in southern Africa that has historically been recorded as an arrow poison used locally when hunting animals including springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis).

Some researchers had proposed that bowhunting in southern Africa during the Late Pleistocene probably involved poison. Yet the evidence available so far has mainly consisted of mechanical indicators and possible traces of plant residue, both of which remained uncertain.

Swedish archaeologist Sven Isaksson of Stockholm University led the latest research to investigate this proposal.

For several years, he and his colleagues have worked to recover unambiguous evidence of plant poisons from arrowheads that are hundreds of years old. They are now applying those same methods to artefacts that are thousands of years older.

In the end, five of the 60,000-year-old arrowheads were shown to hold traces of buphandrine, a toxic plant alkaloid also identified in poisoned arrow tips dating from 250 years ago.

One ancient arrowhead also contained another toxic alkaloid, epibuphanisine. In their published paper, Isaksson and his colleagues write that this "cannot be coincidental."

Both buphandrine and epibuphanisine occur in the leaves of B. disticha. Of the 269 bowhunting groups historically known from southern Africa, 168 are documented as using poisoned arrows.

Finding remains of these toxins on arrowheads that are approximately 60,000 years old indicates that this ingenious survival method has an extremely long history.

Ancient hunters' planning and plant knowledge

"Because poison is not a physical force, but functions chemically, the hunters must also have relied on advanced planning, abstraction, and causal reasoning," the study authors speculate.

Even before this result, study author Marlize Lombard of the University of Johannesburg had maintained that it was reasonable to suppose hunter-gatherers in southern Africa used poisoned arrow tips around 60,000 years ago, if not earlier.

In a 2025 research article, she noted that people in the region already understood and used plants for food, medicine and repelling insects by that period. Why, then, could they not also have known and used poisonous plants?

Scientists recently found evidence that Neanderthals were producing complex glues from plant material around 200,000 years ago.

The ingenuity of ancient hominins continues to surprise us.

The study was published in Science Advances.