Did Cavemen Play Darts?

by Dr John V. Day

Did cavemen ever play darts? They did according to the satirical writer Martin Amis. In his novel LONDON FIELDS, Amis writes about a spoof handbook on darts which traces the history of darts "back to caveman times. The top caveman would be the man who brought back the meat every time, employing his darts skills."

Fact is, Martin, you may have been joking, but you were bang on target. Darts -- or at least the practice of aiming missiles -- has an ancestry that goes back millions of years, back to the time when the earliest humans lived on the African savannah and hunted by throwing rocks at antelopes, pigs and gazelles.

But let us begin the story even further back, when our ancestors were still apes. We know that it's rare for chimps and other primates to throw with any accuracy. But chimps will throw stones wildly when hunting pigs, for instance, trying to scare and to isolate the young ones, and probably our distant ancestors hunted like this, millions of years ago.

Throwing missiles wildly was an important first step in humans evolving to *aim* them -- a complex business for the brain and the arm -- to stun or kill animals, or to drive them over cliffs.

Our ancestors have been making tools in stone for more than two million years, and the ball-shaped stone tools found in east Africa that date to this period may be among the first stone missiles. Hunting became more important to our ancestors over time, especially for the early human called "Homo erectus", which appeared over one million years ago in east Africa and had evolved arm and hand bones that certainly look adapted for throwing missiles. Living on the African savannah, *Homo erectus* was forced to hunt a lot in order to survive, when other animals were eating its plant foods. If you ate meat, the African savannah offered a walking larder that had far more food per square mile and far more calories than if you stuck to roots, berries and fruits. (Nuts are full of protein, it's true, but they are usually seasonal.)

In his book THE NEANDERTHAL QUESTION, Stan Gooch speculates that these early humans, half-way between us and apes, would "practise their running and throwing, and specifically compete with each other in these skills. Many of our present-day pastimes (darts, pool, billiards, all track and field athletics) probably derive their instinctive elements and psychological motivation from these times."

Food from the hunting of animals contributed even more to our ancestors?diet when humans migrated northwards into Europe, where edible plants were less abundant yet huge herds of animals like reindeer and bison lived on the plains, especially during the Ice Ages.

Early humans were using spears by at least 400,000 years ago, as suggested by the two six-foot spruce spears found in 1997 at Schöningen in Germany, and (because wood rots and destroys our evidence) probably long before that.

By the time our ancestors were living in Europe during the last of the Ice Ages (and now looking just like us, going by their bones), we find they had developed spear-throwers, the earliest known example coming from France around 14,000 years ago. A spear-thrower lengthens your arm, in effect, providing you with more leverage and greater power, and experiments with them have killed deer at 30 yards. This invention helped hunters: they could keep a safe distance from their prey and could hunt alone, not needing to surround an animal to spear it.

As for bows and arrows, the first direct evidence we have is either the 10,000 year-old wooden arrow-shafts from northern Germany, found at the camp-sites of reindeer hunters, or what look like stone arrow-heads from Spain, over 25,000 years old. (Bows, being made of wood and sinew or gut, will easily perish.) If you hunt with a bow you can remain hidden -- that's a big plus. And your arrow travels faster than a spear does, and hits with more force when animals are far away. With a bow and arrow you can kill your prey at over 80 yards.

These hunters over the last few million years, whether using rocks, spears, or bows and arrows, must have been males. Evolution has designed men to be good hunters. On average, they are taller and stronger than women, and faster runners, too, ideally built for chasing after wild animals which have a turn of speed. Out of 179 traditional societies across the world which even today hunt animals for food, in no less than 166 the hunting is done only by the men.

And according to psychologists men are on average better at "visuo-spatial" tests than women (who are better with words). This means that men tend to be good at analysing what they see -- finding patterns, noticing movements, judging distances.

Again, evolution has ensured that men possess this "visuo-spatial" ability -- vital when confronting wild animals, judging their leaps and trying to avoid their snarling jaws. You wanted them for your evening meal, and maybe they had the same idea about you.

These days we are more likely to buy a McDonalds than to go out hunting gazelle or reindeer. Still, millions of years of hunting have impressed on us an enjoyment of aiming at targets.

In spite of living in cities and working in factories and offices we still remain, in the words of anthropologists Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, Ice Age hunters who are "fine-honed machines for the efficient pursuit of game". That hunting by aimed throwing was crucial in human evolution, as the evolutionary psychologists Sue Taylor Parker and Kathleen Gibson point out, "is also suggested by the ubiquity of aimed throwing games among human males".

Not without reason did Stan Gooch call these distant ancestors of ours, living millions of years ago, "early Darts teams".