A boomerang cut from a gigantic tusk is one of the oldest in the world, and it could even be older than archaeologists, according to a recent round of radio cabbage dust dating.
Archaeologists dug up the Mammoth-Tusk Boomerang in the Oulazowa cave of Poland in the nineties, and they originally dated with about 18,000 years old, making it one of the world's oldest intact boomerangs. But according to recent analysis by researcher from the University of Bologna Sahra Talamo and her colleagues, the Boomerang was made about 40,000 years ago. If they are right, it offers tempting instructions about how people lived on the hard tundra of what is now Poland during the last ice age.
A boomerang cut from Mammoetoer
The Mammoet-Tusk Boomerang is about 72 centimeters long, carefully bent and formed so that one end is slightly more rounded than the other. It still carries scratches and wear from the life of the Mammoet, along with fine, parallel grooves that mark where an old traditional vessels formed the boomerang and smoothed out. At the rounded end, a series of diagonal signs would have made the weapon easier to grab. It is made smooth and worn from frequent handling: the last traces of the life of a paleolithic hunter.
Based on experiments with a replica, the Polish mammoth Boomerang flies smoothly but does not return, similar to certain types of Aboriginal Australian boomerangs. It even looks a lot like a style used by Aboriginal people from Queensland, Australia, but that is a case of people at different times and places that come very similar designs to meet similar needs.
But critical, according to Talamo and her colleagues, the Boomerang is about 40,000 years old.
That is a huge leap of the original radio cabbage date, made in 1996, which was based on a monster of material from the Boemerang itself and estimated an age of 18,000 years. But Talamo and her colleagues claim that the original date was not in line with the ages of other nearby artifacts from the same layer of the cave floor. That suggested that the Boomerang monster was perhaps contaminated on the way by modern carbon, making it look younger. To test the idea, the archaeologists are radio parbon dated samples of 13 animal bones – plus one of a human thumb – housed from the same layer of the Cave floor sediment as the boomerang.
