Researchers have identified traces of plant poison from the South African plant gifbol on Stone Age arrowheads – the oldest known arrow poison in the world to date. The discovery, published in the scientific journal Science Advances, shows that 60,000 years ago, people in southern Africa had already developed advanced knowledge of toxic substances and how they could be used for hunting.

An international research team led by Jean-Jacques Hublin (Collège de France & Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology), David Lefèvre (Université de Montpellier Paul Valéry), Giovanni Muttoni (Università degli Studi di Milano) and Abderrahim Mohib (Moroccan Institut National des Sciences de l’Archéologie et du Patrimoine, INSAP) reports the analysis of new hominin fossils from the site of Thomas Quarry I (Casablanca, Morocco). The fossils are very securely dated to 773,000 plus/minus 4,000 years ago, thanks to a high-resolution magnetostratigraphic record capturing in detail the Brunhes/Matuyama boundary, the last main geomagnetic polarity reversal and precise temporal markers of the Quaternary. Published in Nature, this work highlights African populations near the base of the lineage that eventually gave rise to Homo sapiens, providing new insights into the shared ancestry of H. sapiens, Neandertals, and Denisovans.

This study is undertaken by the research teams led by Prof. Hu Yaowu from the Department of Cultural Heritage and Museology and Institute of Archaeological Science at the Fudan University, and led by Prof. Liu Daiyun in Shanxi Academy of Archaeology. They conducted stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of 36 human bone samples from 25 individuals of the Sixteen Kingdoms period (including long bones and ribs from the same individual) from tombs of Phases II and III of the Xi’an Xianyang Airport site (XXA (SKP)).