Until now, it was generally assumed that the ability to produce projectile weapons like bow-fired arrows was exclusive to Homo sapiens , yet the puzzling discovery of a series of arrowheads that predate the arrival of our species may be about to change all that. Found at the Obi-Rakhmat rock shelter in Uzbekistan, the small, sharp points were produced around 80,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were the dominant humans in the region. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

According to the authors of a new study, the age of the arrowheads is “disconcerting”, since stone weapons found in Neanderthal sites are often large in size and similar in shape to other tools used for butchering or harvesting plants. However, while exami

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