Bone Harpoon

Origins

For most of human prehistory, the working edge of a weapon was stone and its shaft was wood. Bone and antler came later as materials for points, and they brought something stone could not easily give: long, thin barbs that let a point go in and stay in. The oldest known barbed bone points come from Katanda, on the Semliki River in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Dated by several methods to roughly 90,000 years ago, they were found with the bones of large catfish and appear to have been made for spearing fish in the river shallows. If the dates are right, they are tens of thousands of years older than anything comparable in Europe, and they are one of the earliest signs of specialized, carefully planned hunting technology among modern humans.

Design & Construction

In Europe the harpoon reached its highest development in the Magdalenian culture at the end of the last Ice Age, between about 17,000 and 12,000 years ago. Magdalenian craftsmen worked reindeer and red deer antler by cutting long splinters from the beam with stone burins, then shaping them by scraping and grinding. Early harpoons have a single row of small barbs; later ones have larger barbs, sometimes in two rows. The base was shaped with a swelling, a perforation or a projecting spur so that a line could be tied to it. That detail matters: it shows that many of these were true harpoons, with a head designed to come away from the shaft and stay in the animal, held by a line, rather than simple barbed spears. The heads were mounted in a socket at the end of a wooden shaft and bound with sinew and resin.

Combat Use

The bone harpoon was a hunting weapon. At Katanda it took fish; in Magdalenian Europe it was used for fish, especially salmon in the rivers of southwestern France, and very likely for seals and larger game, launched by hand or with the Atlatl, the spear-thrower that appears in the same cultures. There is no clear evidence that harpoons were made for fighting other people, and it would be wrong to describe them as war weapons. But the line between hunting and fighting tools was thin in the Stone Age, and the barbed point — a head that holds in the wound — is an idea that returns in every later age, from barbed arrowheads to the heavy Roman Pilum.

Legacy

Carved antler harpoons are among the signature artifacts of the Magdalenian, and archaeologists use their changing forms — single-row to double-row barbs — to date the layers of cave sites like La Madeleine, from which the culture takes its name. Harpoons remained essential to later hunting peoples, most famously the toggling harpoons of the Arctic, which turned sideways in the wound. Together with the Clovis Point and the Flint Hand Axe, the bone harpoon shows how far weapon-making had advanced long before metal, and how much skill went into objects that survive only as small pieces of bone.