First Use of Poison

Top 10 Discoveries of 2012 January/February 2013

Lebombo Mountains, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
SHARE:

A notched wooden stick from South Africa’s Border Cave dating to 24,000 years ago contains the earliest evidence of humans using poison. The artifact was found in the 1970s, but new chemical analyses conducted by a research team led by Francesco d’Errico of Bordeaux University in France revealed trace amounts of substances from poisonous castor beans. The stick may have been used to apply poison to arrowheads just as a culture of modern-day hunter-gatherers called the San does toda

Become a Digital Subscriber Today

Get full access to all content on the ARCHAEOLOGY website and our PDF archive going back to the first publication in March 1948.

Already a Subscriber? Sign In

MORE FROM Top 10 Discoveries of 2012

  • Top 10 Discoveries of 2012 January/February 2013

    Neanderthal Medicine Chest

    Piloña, Asturias, Spain

    Read Article
    Neanderthal-plaque
    (Courtesy CSIC Comunicación)
  • Top 10 Discoveries of 2012 January/February 2013

    Aztec Ritual Burial

    Mexico City, Mexico

    Read Article
    (Courtesy Melitón Tapia/INAH)
  • Features January/February 2013

    Neolithic Europe's Remote Heart

    One thousand years of spirituality, innovation, and social development emerge from a ceremonial center on the Scottish archipelago of Orkney

    Read Article
    Adam Stanford/Aerial Cam
  • Features January/February 2013

    The Water Temple of Inca-Caranqui

    Hydraulic engineering was the key to winning the hearts and minds of a conquered people

    Read Article
    Caranqui-opener
    (Courtesy Tamara L. Bray)
  • Letter from France January/February 2013

    Structural Integrity

    Nearly 20 years of investigation at two rock shelters in southwestern France reveal the well-organized domestic spaces of Europe's earliest modern humans

    Read Article
  • Artifacts January/February 2013

    Pacific Islands Trident

    A mid-nineteenth-century trident illustrates a changing marine ecosystem in the South Pacific

    Read Article
    (Catalog Number 99071 © The Field Museum, [CL000_99071_Overall], Photographer Christopher J. Philipp)