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Archaeologists have discovered what could be the world’s oldest poison weapon at a 125,000-year-old site on the edge of an ancient lake in Saudi Arabia. The stone tools, which were likely used to hunt large animals, bore traces of residue from a poisonous tree historically used for its toxins.
“At 125,000 years, they would be significantly older than the poisoned arrowheads recently identified in South Africa, which dates from around 60,000 years ago”, co-author of the study Chris Clarksonarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Germany and Griffith University in Australia, told Live Science in an email. “But we have not demonstrated exactly how the poison was prepared or whether it was effective. So I would describe them as potentially the oldest evidence of poisoned hunting weapons, rather than the first unequivocally established.”
In the new study, published Thursday November 12 in the journal Scienceresearchers studied a 125,000-year-old site in southern Saudi Arabia known as Uruq Aljelibah, which means “sand dunes of a waterhole,” co-author of the study. Frans van Buchemgeologist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, told Live Science.
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Today, the region is “hot, extremely dry, with extensive sand dunes,” Clarkson said, located in the Empty Quarter, one of the hottest and driest deserts on the planet. But scientists discovered that the site was once home to a freshwater lake measuring about 130 square miles (340 square kilometers) and up to 95 feet (29 meters) deep. Fossils suggest that it was once home to a rich diversity of flora and fauna, including hippos, buffalo, ostriches, camels, gazelles, oryx, palms, reeds, trees and shrubs, which early modern humans probably exploited for food and other resources.
“The idea of hippos and enormous buffalo living around a lake in what is now the Empty Quarter shows how dramatically these landscapes and global climates have changed,” Clarkson said.
Saudi Arabia is now a desert, but once a lush landscape.
(Image credit: Christopher Clarkson / Griffith University)
Archaeologists have discovered more than 5,500 stone objects at the site, as well as extraordinarily preserved traces of plant materials, such as fibers, resins and wood. Several of these artifacts were stone points that exhibited impact damage consistent with hunting large animals, and microscopic analysis revealed traces of animal tissue near the tips of the points. The distribution of stone tools closely matched mounds of animal bones, suggesting that the lakeshores were a focal point for hunting and game processing, according to the study.
“At most Paleolithic sites, we’re lucky if we get stone tools and maybe a few animal bones,” Clarkson said. “Here we can actually start to reconstruct what these tools did and what other materials people combined with them.”
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Researchers have discovered that humans may have hunted animals with poison-tipped tools. Several stone points had chemical residue related to the poison arrow shaft (Acokanthera schimperi), which is historically known for its toxins and is native to eastern and central Africa and southern Arabia. African hunters coated the tips of spears and arrows with extracts of this plant to paralyze or kill game.
It remains unclear how the hunters who poisoned their targets could have avoided poisoning themselves by eating the game.
“The effects of a poison It depends on the substance, the dose and how it enters the body,” Clarkson said. “A poison introduced directly into a wound does not necessarily behave the same way when swallowed.” Hunters throughout history “are known to sometimes remove the meat from around the wound before eating the rest of the animal,” he added.
“These results highlight how researchers have often underestimated the technological complexity of early human populations, because much of what they made was organic and simply disappeared,” Clarkson said. “It wasn’t just people removing stone chips,” Clarkson noted. “They combined stone with wood, plant fibers, resins and potentially toxic substances to make complex tools and weapons.”
Having so much evidence of how people created and used tools on a site like this “is remarkable.” Éléonore Scerrian archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Germany who was not involved in this research, told Live Science in an email. “It goes both from the microscopic scale, finding traces of how people held spear points, for example, to the larger scale of the whole site and the very compelling spatial relationship between hunting-related tools and the bones of animals such as hippos.”
Sites in Arabia that have both stone tools and animal bones are rare, Jeffrey Rosea Paleolithic archaeologist from the University of the Algarve in Portugal who was not involved in this study, told Live Science in an email. “This one has thousands of objects on an ancient lake shore, alongside hippos, buffalo and ostriches, and some of the flakes have reassembled themselves, so the tools were made on site,” he said. “This is valuable new data.”
Out of Africa
The Arabian Peninsula lies between Africa and the rest of Asia and was a major corridor for humans as they dispersed across the world. Recurring periods of increased precipitation could have made its otherwise hostile landscapes more habitable in the past. However, the hot desert that now covers much of Arabia has made it difficult for scientists to delve into many details about this vital bridge at this critical time in human history.
Researchers found no human remains. Yet they suspect that the site most likely belonged to modern humans (our species, Homo sapiens), as opposed to a different human species.
“We know that H. sapiens had already expanded out of Africa and were present in southwest Asia during this period,” Clarkson said. “The age of the site is consistent with these early movements.”
These findings add to growing evidence that wetter intervals in Arabia created migration corridors between Africa and Asia and supported productive habitats capable of supporting repeated human occupation.
“What our site shows is that people weren’t necessarily just passing through these environments,” Clarkson said. “They were operating them in quite sophisticated ways, using a whole range of technologies and resources.”
But Rose cautioned that all of the stone artifacts found in this study were collected from the surface. “None has been extracted from the dated layers,” he said. “The date of 125,000 years belongs to the lake, not to the tools. For the tools, it is only a maximum age.” Future research at the site should look for stone artifacts sealed in the lake beds. “It’s difficult in Arabia, where wind has reduced most sites to surface scatters, but it can be done,” Rose said.
Clarkson agrees that additional work is needed. “I would really like to return to this site to find more fossils, both animal and hopefully human fossils,” Clarkson said. “I would also very much like to pursue further chemical and functional analyses, especially evidence of toxic plant compounds. It would be fascinating to determine exactly which substances were used, how they could have been prepared and whether they were deliberately applied to hunting weapons.”
Future research focusing on ancient lake margins may reveal more information. “There must be other places where people lived and conducted activities, and some may preserve better stratified archaeological deposits,” Clarkson said.
But the combination of findings at this site is astonishing, the researchers said.
“I’ve spent much of my career studying stone tools, and one of the great frustrations is that we generally only look at the small fraction of ancient technology that survives,” Clarkson said. “Here we get to see a lot more of the complete technology system.”
Clarkson, C., Price, GJ, Kalifi, A., Losi, G., Matheson, C., Al-Jibreen, F., Alsharekh, AM, Armitage, SJ, Blilou, I., Boivin, N., Breeze, PS, Drake, N., Duval, M., Gradwell, S., Groucutt, HW, Guagnin, M., Guzmán, J., Hapiot, L., Martínez-Pillado, V.,… van Buchem, F. (2026). Poisoned hunting weapons, megafauna and plant use on a 125,000-year-old Arabian paleolake. Science. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aef9342
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