Well, the title explains it: this article’s gonna be talking about weapons. (NOTE: NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART, because we’re gonna be explicitly talking about the usages of said weapons)
All disclaimers aside, humans started using weapons as soon as we were able to walk on two legs. Around 3 million years ago, in southern Tanzania, apes like Australopithecus garhi started eating meat in order for larger brains in order to keep safe on the large African Savanna. Then, if scavengers like hyenas came by, our ape-like ancestors would hurl rocks or even jab sharp bones at them. Soon after, Homo came by and we started making hand axes, stone blades designed to butcher. Pretty gruesome, but most hand axes were used like cleavers to chop off dainty portions of meat to be cooked.
Wooden spears were probably invented around 2 million years ago, and were made of long poles sharpened at the end using hand axes. They were popular until 500k years ago, when the composite spear was invented by Homo heidelbergensis, our most recent ancestor and the splitting point between us, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. The composite spear had a wooden shaft with an indentation at the end, in which sharp stone blades could be inserted in. They were fixed in place with resin and deer hoof glue. Then, a thin piece of leather was wrapped around the stone and shaft on the dried resin and securely tied to ensure that the stone wouldn’t fall out.
Clubs, cudgels, and hatchets were made in similar ways. Stone blades or knobs were tied and glued to wooden handles. In the case of the axe, the stone was driven through the handle through a special gap at the top of the handle. These were our primary weapons until a 100,000 years ago, when humans that we’d recognize appeared. We lived in Africa, on the beaches of what would become Cape Cod and in the rainforests of the Congo, and the human diet was mainly wild grains and fish fry. Fishing harpoons became popular at 90,000 years ago, and at 70,000 we decided to move out of Africa. Then, around 60,000 years we came into contact with other humans and killed or had kids with them.
Around 78k years ago, humans started making bows and arrows in South Africa. For a while, nothing happened. Then, suddenly, we clambered a huge step in the journey of evolution. We started to smelt copper. A LOT OF COPPER. So much, that the transition from the Stone Age to actual history is called the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age. Copper spears, harpoons, and axes were popular. Clubs and cudgels fell out of fashion. The atlatl, an Ice Age weapon used for throwing spears, became popular in the Americas, where it would be extensively used in the Middle Ages and Renaissance by the Aztecs and Mayans. During this time, though, the amentum or ankule developed as an alternative to the atlatl, replacing the wooden ladle-like atlatl with a long leather strap.
During this time (3000 BCE), the Minoans from the Greek island of Crete started to experiment with copper, mixing it with tin to produce bronze. And bronze proved to be the biggest accomplishment in human history that had happened then. Minoan bronze swords, daggers, and their new navigating technologies spread their influence throughout the world. Inconclusive evidence even hints that the Minoans may have reached the Americas approximately four thousand years before the Vikings or Columbus. Bronze spread to Egypt and the Hittite Empire, where it was essential in defending against the Assyrians of Mesopotamia, who had iron weapons. After the fall of the Minoans, their descendants the Mycenaeans, and the ending of the Trojan War, iron caught on in Greece, who used bronze armor and iron weapons. Thus began the iron age, with all of Europe now sufficiently using iron.
Developments really didn’t happen until the 10th century AD, when the Chinese experimented with gunpowder and used ‘fire lances’, the first hand cannons, tubes of bamboo or paper filled with shrapnel and pellets and gunpowder that worked like a bomb with a slow match. Europeans adapted this to the hand cannon and used it destructively.
And that’s where we’re gonna leave today.
Anay Ganesh 